


from that unknown

by flirtygaybrit



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Ghosts, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pining, Post-Canon, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:55:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25205092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flirtygaybrit/pseuds/flirtygaybrit
Summary: For three decades Clark Kent has been haunted by an unsettling spectre with fiery eyes, and at last seeks to understand and confront the genesis of his fear. In the present, Bruce discovers an unfortunate truth, and must come to terms with certain ghosts of his own.Or: Superman is dead, but not exactly gone.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 8
Kudos: 60
Collections: Superbat Reverse Bang 2020





	from that unknown

**Author's Note:**

> At last! \o/ I can finally share the most enthusiastic and emotional thanks to my immensely talented and lovely partner, [nowrunalong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowrunalong), whose INCREDIBLE art was the driving force behind this piece and who gave me the freedom to play with such a delightful concept. P L E A S E [check it out here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25175866) and join me in yelling about how excellent it is, because as they say: give an author a canonical character death, and they'll write you a fix-it fic. Give an author a haunting image of, well, _a haunting_ , and they'll take it upon themselves to tell you a good, old-fashioned ghost story.

_i. awake you children bold_

“Mom! _Mom_! He’s here! He’s here again, he was here, I saw him standing right there, he—he…”

Clark Kent shuddered uncontrollably in his mother’s arms, choking back tears that were as embarrassed as they were angry and as relieved as they were frightened. It was a cool summer night, and he was ten years old. A mature ten, a brave ten, but in the moment he did not feel brave or mature or anything other than afraid.

Ten years was too old to be crying over shadows in the dark, too old to be frightened of nightmares that faded when the hall light spilled into the bedroom and sent the darkness scurrying, and yet ten years was far too young to be able to peel a person apart layer by layer with the blink of an eye. Clark, unfortunately, was capable of both. He was ten years old, and while he was no ordinary ten-year-old, tonight he had more in common with children his age than he had in the last several years.

For Martha Kent, who had dutifully thrown on every single light switch on her way from her own bedroom to Clark’s, a relief. Tonight, she could hold and comfort her son in the way that other mothers could over things that other parents dealt with regularly.

Tonight, things were almost normal.

“I know, sweetie. I believe you. I believe you.”

Martha held Clark as close and as strongly as she could, and Clark allowed himself to be held without the unconsciousness that came with adolescence and growing up. He was so small, she thought, running her fingers through his hair. Not small for his age, not at ten years old, growing like a bad weed, an inch or three a day now, it seemed; no, he was small as he trembled fearfully in her arms, small in the way that children became in the face of a recurring nightmare, holding their arms and legs close and speaking in nothing louder than a whisper. Become small, become invisible, and no harm will come to you. All children knew that.

Clark was brave. Her son was brave, and he was strong, and he would soon outgrow these nightmares, would soon outgrow the shadows of creatures that had plagued his dreams for more than two years now, monstrous abominations with yawning chasms for mouths and embers for eyes, glowing bright with the fires of hell. The sort of creatures that would be easy to find in the dark, and could only be banished by the light. 

Clark would soon outgrow the need to be held and comforted by his mother after every bad dream, as all children inevitably did, but tonight she would hold him. Tonight he needed it.

“He was standing… f-floating… there. By the laundry.”

He pointed at the corner of his bedroom, and Martha understood. Perched atop a misshapen pile of Clark’s clothing, which lay scattered on his dresser instead of in the clothing bin that he had been instructed to toss his laundry into instead, was a baseball cap that Clark had spent the better part of the last three months hiding the spring of his curly hair beneath. In the darkness, with the right lighting, it might have given the impression that the clothing pile had a head. Martha was familiar with the way the shadows threw themselves in this room; Clark considered himself too old for a night light, and so had it not been for the the overhead light that Martha had known to turn on before the rest of her body had even made it through the door, the shadow might have continued harassing Clark until sunrise. It was easy to banish. Reach in, light on, mom’s here. Terrors, be gone.

Well, there was an easier solution. It just involved Clark burning a new hole through his bedroom wall.

“Aha,” Martha said softly. “Yeah, I see what you mean. Just a few inches off the floor, over there?”

She’d never thought to ask other parents if they actually looked. It felt like an unspoken responsible parent thing, to routinely crack open the closet door to reveal inert clothing, to check beneath the bed and crack a joke about the cobwebs and the dust bunnies, to ensure that no strange lights reflected in the mirror might suggest the presence of eyes gleaming in the dark. Clark had appreciated it, and even though it was no longer necessary—as Clark could see through the doors, through the bed, through the mirrors—he often seemed, in a silent way, to appreciate the gesture nonetheless.

“Do you wanna talk about him? Were you dreaming about something before you woke up?”

Clark shook his head. 

“It didn’t feel like a dream,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“I dunno. It just didn’t.”

He never wanted to talk about him. Not in the night. When he did, it was always the same details that his mind seemed to fixate on, always the same nightmare reskinned. In every version, Clark could not see through the monster, or the ghost, or whatever he was. It always took the shape of a man, a screaming man, and deep inside this man there must have been a heart of evil, for Clark always recalled an open, screaming mouth, and wide, eyeless sockets, and a light like fire that shone from within. Not a terribly unusual nightmare for a child, though one would expect Clark, with his unusual talents and abilities, to find it somewhat less frightening.

But he was afraid. Less so now, less so when the lights were on and someone had checked under the bed and in the closet, but when he was younger... well, Martha had always assumed it was simply part of growing up for Clark, special as he was. Ever since his strange transition into adolescence—the change, she and Jonathan called it, laughing a bit awkwardly; the change, like Clark had suddenly become someone new, like their little boy had been swept away in the dead of night and replaced with a stranger who saw glowing eyes in the dark and silent, screamless mouths—Clark had even stopped sleeping with a mirror in his room.

“Well, it looks like he left in a hurry,” Martha said decisively, having given the laundry pile a satisfactory once-over. “And it’s a good thing, too. If he tried to come floating around my bedroom, he’d be the one screaming, I promise you that.”

Clark gave a nervous giggle. He wiped his face on his pajama sleeve. He’d stopped trembling, and seemed to have regained some good cheer now that the dark and the terror had faded. Martha smiled and kissed him on the head, and was indescribably pleased when he wrinkled his nose without further complaint.

“That’s better. Should I sleep in here tonight?”

“I think I’ll be okay,” Clark mumbled, giving the laundry pile and its baseball cap a wary glance.

“You sure? If you scoot over, I can tell you a story or two. They’d be scary enough to give any ghost a nightmare.”

“Mom,” Clark whined, shoving gently and ineffectively in that way that embarrassed children often do when they don’t yet want to be released. “I’m okay. I can sleep alone. It was probably just a bad dream.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

Martha pretended to think. “Well… only if you promise me that you’re not gonna try to take on the next guy who comes floating through.”

Clark heaved an exasperated sigh. “I’m not gonna wake up and start lasering the walls again,” he insisted. He was smiling, small but certain, and so Martha knew she could believe him. 

“Well… all right,” she said, ruffling Clark’s hair in a way that felt as if it was meant to reassure and soothe them both. “But if you want, you can always come sleep with me and your dad.”

“Thanks,” Clark said softly, and then, after another quiet sniffle: “But maybe… maybe you can stay. Just for a while.”

Martha smiled softly.

Clark was ten. He was brave, always brave, growing more each day… and tonight he was frightened, and so very small.

“The Burning Man again?”

“The Burning Man again.” Martha slipped back into bed and settled into place with a weary sigh. The mattress had nearly gone cold in the time it had taken her to comfort Clark enough for sleep to come, but she would never complain about it. “Another one of those weird awake-not-awake-nightmares. Good news is: no holes in the wall this time. I finally got him to fall asleep by telling stories about when you were his age… how you used to plant popcorn and were so confused when a corn stalk didn’t pop out.”

Jonathan Kent chuckled and turned over in bed. He, too, had been startled awake by Clark’s screams of terror, and had been halfway out of bed, prepared to turn the lights on and drive the nightmares away. Martha had simply raced him to it.

“What was it this time?”

“I don’t know. Pile of laundry, I think, with the hat sitting on top. A trip to the hamper took care of that.”

Since Clark’s extra-human traits had manifested, there had not been a single member of the Kent household who had not needed to make some adjustments to his or her routine, and certain boundaries that had been easily set before now required some clarification. Locked or zip-tied things needed to be kept locked or zip-tied, not opened with superhuman strength or melted into a puddle. The barn was not to be jumped or climbed upon... nor was the silo, nor the weather vane, for that matter. Walls were walls and not windows for a reason.

And mirrors were not to be broken, either by concentrated blasts of heat, alarm clocks, or pillows thrown hard enough to be used as military-grade weapons. Not even if they revealed dark figures with glowing eyes. 

“It’s just his imagination,” Jonathan said, soft and tired in the way that fathers who did not fully understand could often be. “He’ll forget about it in the morning. Probably woke up to use the bathroom, saw the pile of laundry, and thought it was… you know.”

Jonathan didn’t continue his sentence. He didn’t have to. He thought Clark was frightened of himself, had admitted as much to his wife more than once as Clark’s nightmares took a familiar form, and it made perfect sense to him why his son would be so frightened of such an image: Clark still hadn’t come to terms with his abilities, his gifts, his differences. He didn’t know about the ship beneath the barn. It frightened him, the things he could do, the things that made him so unlike other children. Sometimes it frightened all of them, in truth, and while Jonathan loved him no less for it, he knew that there was nothing more terrifying to a child than something they had no explanation for. 

Simply put, Clark’s unknown self became another in his eyes, a mirror of a boy growing into a man with features he neither fully understood nor fully seemed to control. He became a spectre in the night, a featureless menace with fire for eyes, screaming fearfully at his own reflection in the dark. It was obvious what the Burning Man was, what he represented. Obvious to anyone who was not terrified of shadows in the dark, at least. But it was a difficult thing to tell a child, how fears manifested, and so Burning Man continued to exist, terrorize, and burn.

It was easy to explain. It was impossible to explain.

Jonathan slid an arm around Martha’s waist. She’d spent a lot of time fretting over these dreams, these nightmares. Sometimes Jonathan would act faster, and sometimes he would be left comforting Clark as effectively as one could in the face of a false danger. They all lost sleep over the Burning Man, but Jonathan suspected that one day Clark would simply realize this on his own, and the nightmares would stop. They had to.

“Go back to sleep,” he murmured. “He’s sleeping now, and you should be too. Staying up all night won’t do you any good, and you can’t keep him safe from the things in his head. He’ll grow out of it. One day he’ll look back on this whole thing and he’ll feel silly for ever being afraid.”

“I hope you’re right,” Martha said quietly. 

Although Jonathan fell asleep quickly, Martha kept her eyes open for a long time after, watching the shadows cast along the bedroom wall, half-hoping that something might move. It might be a greater comfort, she thought, to know that there was something out there she could protect him from. The shadows held no danger for her, and did not frighten her nearly as much as the idea that there was something she could not save her son from.

•

It was a terrible tragedy to die at the age of thirty-five, and Bruce knew that well enough. Clark’s gravestone was not the first monument to a thirty-five-year old that he had seen.

The Bryce Monuments artist that he had spoken with in Smallville had not seemed to recognize the name he was given, and Bruce had not offered further information or explanation. It was more than enough for most in the memorial and monument business to know the appropriate dates and the correct spelling of the name, and a quotation or epitaph if necessary; Martha Kent had been the one to decide, ultimately, what marker her son deserved, but being the anonymous benefactor, Bruce had given the online memorial catalogue a perfunctory read-through, skimming the columbarium monuments and sculptures and squat, slanted markers. He knew already the details of the order, and so perhaps it was morbid curiosity that drew him to imagine Clark’s name inscribed on the various models in the catalogue. For obvious reasons Clark’s body was not cremated, which meant that a traditional memorial stone would suffice—likely something that would match the simple, classic shape of the headstone bearing Jonathan Kent’s name. 

Though Bruce knew more about Superman than Clark Kent, he suspected that beveled hearts or themed reliefs laser-etched into the stone would not have impressed him. That, too, was a shame. A gravestone for a hero should have been brighter, bolder, more obvious… and in the end, his headstone simply told all that it needed to: it was Clark Joseph Kent who lay in the newest plot, with a nondescript floral engraving that closely matched the one on the adjacent memorial that bore the signs of nearly two decades’ worth of weathering. It was uncomfortably familiar in a way that Bruce could not entirely describe, and he simply settled for acknowledging its similarity to the grave of Jonathan Kent, which—like the graves of Harold and Eliza and the many Kents who had come before and now called the Smallville Cemetery their home—bore dates and epitaphs. 

Jonathan Kent was a Beloved Husband and Father, and had been laid to rest at the age of forty-six.

Clark Joseph Kent had simply died.

And so it was that Bruce learned more about Clark Kent by ordering a tombstone than he ever had learned about Clark Kent while he was alive.

“He was thirty-five,” Bruce said aloud. He did not say that his mother had been thirty-five when she was buried, too, and therefore did not add that she had been a respected philanthropist and charity champion who had made a name for herself beyond the fame that came with her marriage to Thomas Wayne. He was incapable of laying the names side-by-side and comparing deeds, achievements, legacy. There was no true comparison between Clark and his mother, no shared similarities… none beyond the fact that they had died at thirty-five, and that he had been unable to save either.

Instead, he asked: “Who lives to thirty-five without anyone knowing who they were?”

Lois Lane, who sat on the opposite side of the bare dining table, still warming her fingers on a mug of coffee that hadn’t coughed up so much as a wisp of steam in well over ten minutes, snorted softly, humourlessly. “You may not have known him, but that doesn’t mean that nobody knew who he was.”

“His family knew,” Bruce amended. “But you know what I mean. He couldn’t hide it from his parents. You were smarter than the rest, persistent… curious, but not malicious. He was right to confide in you. But so few knew about him until Superman came along. Until Luthor...”

Neither Lois nor Bruce had spoken at length about Lex Luthor or the events that had transpired. At least, not to one another. Lex Luthor’s sentencing had spoken for itself, and had brought an air of somber triumph with a fresh wave of grief for all who attended, and for many who did not. The Daily Planet’s hearing-morning headline had, in Bruce’s opinion, included one of the most vicious and thorough exposés that any newspaper on the eastern coast had produced. It had been, in some small yet significant way, immensely satisfying to read, and was buried inconspicuously among a pile of issues that currently cluttered up Bruce’s coffee table.

“He was smart. He had resources.”

“He had hate in his heart.” Bruce paused. “You were smarter.”

Lois shot him a small, dry smile. The metal of the diamond ring on her finger made itself known with a soft clink against the mug, as though it had politely cleared its throat.

“It wasn’t about being smarter than everyone else. He didn’t try to hide who he was. It didn’t matter if it was a cat stuck in a tree, a car in a sinkhole, or a civilization being threatened by a tyrant. I only found him because of the clues he couldn’t stop leaving. The ones he probably didn’t even know about. Some people leave these… I don’t know. These afterimages of goodwill and kindness wherever they go. Like looking too long at the sun and seeing it behind your eyelids. The shape of them is still there, and you can see it everywhere you go, even when they’re no longer there.”

Bruce understood well enough what she meant. The number of days that he had not thought of Clark since his passing could have easily been confused for a number on the Doomsday Clock. 

“I didn’t know him well,” he said after a moment, “but the stories I’ve heard… the things I’ve seen… it sounds like he was someone whose genuine, altruistic acts trailed behind him like a…”

“Like a cape.”

“Like a cape,” Bruce agreed. “Did it make him happy, wearing it?” 

Lois shrugged. Bruce did not know her well, either, but it seemed that she was adept at forcing herself to seem at ease. Good at making long stretches of unblinking stillness and silence appear contemplative. She was a journalist, and an experienced one at that. She’d know the importance of body language, the way it could change a conversation without words. She’d know if Bruce were being insincere. If, somehow, their shared experience in those last few hours had not humbled him, inspired him, reminded him what honesty felt like.

“This isn’t an interrogation. I don’t mean any disrespect. I’ve only heard stories. Reading his articles, tracking him through local feel-good fluff pieces and sports columns… not that it’s bad reading, but...”

“It only tells you what his editor wanted you to know. Not about him.”

Bruce nodded.

Lois sighed, aimed another long and thoughtful stare into a distant corner; it was the sort of corner in which any billionaire or paranoid vigilante might have thought to place a security camera or a motion sensor. It was a very long and very thoughtful stare.

“It didn’t kill him to put the cape on, if that’s what you’re asking. And it wasn’t the cape that made him who he was, either. Clark was Clark long before he found the ship, or the suit, or even his birthplace.”

“You knew him before then?”

“I was there when he found it. I never thought the suit changed him. For some it might have, having to present yourself in public like that, having to… conceal things about yourself, wear a mask…”

“For some it does. Sometimes Superman is a super man. Sometimes good intentions are only that.” Bruce paused. “I know I said this wasn’t an interrogation, but you never answered my question. Was he happy?”

Lois looked at him for a long while. Bruce knew the expression one made when they were weighing the pros and cons of insulting powerful people; hers was the expression of one who understood and did not fear consequence. “Would you have been? The last of your people, loved and hated and feared and needed in equal amounts?”

Bruce smiled. “I guess I just wonder… what if he’d never put it on? Or what if Superman and General Zod had both died on Black Zero Day? Surely it weighed on him, having a target on his back like that, being the face of all intelligent alien life, the only one present and culpable for damage and death.”

“Sure. The thing about that is… Zod never really died,” she said slowly, focusing on Bruce’s face once more. “And I don’t mean that he was in—in biostasis or whatever they’re saying happens to Kryptonian cells on earth. I mean he _stayed_ with Clark. All of the Kryptonians did, and the people from Metropolis, all of the ones from the day at the Capitol...”

Bruce nodded empathetically and pretended not to notice the way that she rubbed at the ring on her finger. “And many more. When you dedicate your life to saving people, the ones you let down always stay with you.”

The ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of Lois’s mouth as she looked at Bruce, then looked down again. If she, like Clark, could have looked through stone and earth and concrete… well, he knew what she would have seen. Anyone who knew Bruce knew of his loss. Anyone who knew the Bat knew of his, too.

“There’s not a single person alive who won’t know what he did. You’ll have your political opposition, your conspiracy theorists, doomsday fearmongering… I’ll be surprised if LexCorp doesn’t release some bullshit press statement about how shocked they are… oh, they’ll scrub their drives and melt down anything that might lead back to them, but people will know what Luthor did. And what Superman did. What it meant for the world.”

“What about the others who were on the ground?”

“What others?”

Bruce smiled. 

Lois huffed softly, disbelieving. “This isn’t an interview.”

“I know. I didn’t hear anything about anyone else on-scene. Electromagnetic pulses wiped out anything that got too close to get a good view. There’s no existing footage of the incident, so we can only guess at what happened based on two dead Kryptonians and a Kryptonian weapon. If anyone else had been present, they would have been buried under the rubble, and no other casualties were recovered.”

She seemed to consider his words for a moment, then adjusted her position in the way that people who intended to finish a conversation and make thinly-veiled excuses to leave often did. She had no reason to feign comfort around him, and Bruce knew that bragging about his thoughtful contributions to memorials and dedication to promoting a positive posthumous image of Superman would not improve the image she had of him. It had to be a terrible one, he knew, and so Bruce found himself surprised when Lois finally slipped her hands away from her mug and sat up straight.

“It’s hard to believe Clark ever had a bad opinion of you.”

Bruce’s smile was small, but genuine. “No, Miss Lane,” he said, “it isn’t.”

Lois turned and for several long, silent seconds, stared out across the lake. Clouds drifted lazily across the sky, turning the calm surface of the water the colour of cold steel; normally quaint and comforting, much of the surrounding foliage—what was left of it—had grown dull as time had slowly turned its back on fall and now looked ahead to winter. The pallor of death had settled over Gotham and Metropolis both.

“I used to have these dreams,” Bruce said, sliding his hands into his pockets. “Dreams about Kryptonians. Or Clark, I guess, since most of them were about Superman. I always thought of him as this imposing figure with no personality, no moral code, no… humanity. In the dream, he was never anything more than what he could do. A faceless threat in a cape. I wish I’d understood better.”

Lois turned away from the water and cast a long and inscrutable look over Bruce.

“The shape of him is still there,” she said. “If you look hard enough, you might be able to see him.”

•

There is a popular theory which states that dreams are visions of other worlds: visions of things that have been, things that have yet to be, or things that will never be. The waking world and the dreaming world are not one in the same, but a separate possibility. An alternate reality, one which can be accessed by the unconscious mind, the subconscious mind.

One which can be mistaken, if one is not careful, for the truth.

Bruce hung between truths for a fragment of time. Although his mind recognized his dream as a fabrication, and although his eyes had already opened and fixed, black and gleaming in the dark, on the wall opposite his bed, he still saw through that door to another world. In this world. Clark was alive, alive and furious and coming apart at the seams, a whirlwind of searing fire and roaring electrical energy. Bruce knew in this moment that Clark was angry at him, blaming him, his anger stoked into a righteous fury, and he knew that if he only blinked away the inferno that has enveloped Clark, he could close the gate, leave the world of his dream behind—

and then the fire was gone, _Clark_ was gone, but the light remained.

Bruce shielded his eyes and pulled himself slowly upright. The clock on his nightstand told him that it was barely three in the morning, and yet the sun gleamed golden across the floor—no, not the sun, but the lamp. The lamp in the hallway, the Serge Mouille that had heads pointing in all directions like a metallic foxglove, had turned the glass wall of the house semi-opaque, obscuring much the lake beyond and leaving Bruce alone with the dim, groggy reflection of himself.

He rubbed his eyes, his face, scrubbing himself just awake enough to consider climbing to his feet. He found it difficult to believe that he could forget to turn the lamp off, but his nights were often full of forgotten things. Clothing lay strewn over the floor, half-consumed glasses of water sat neatly upon the bedside table, and dreams faded like mist. He wasn’t yet fully alert, not enough to retrace his steps, and so for several minutes he stared at the lake, unable to shake the feeling that he had forgotten something more important.

It was strange. Bruce was no stranger to nightmares, having been plagued by the creative horrors of his memory and imagination for years and haunted by even more as of late, but could often recall little beyond the feeling of dread and terror that faded more quickly than he could process them upon waking. It would have been easy to blame it on his surroundings; the openness of the house and the lake could be unsettling at times, and the television droned quietly in the background, playing a rerun of an earlier news broadcast about the total damages incurred in what news stations and media outlets had begun to refer to as the Black Zero event.

In Gotham there had been little in the way of major losses, as long as one did not consider certain things to be a loss: for example, the number of Gothamites (and various properties, vehicles, and other assets owned by Gothamites) that had been scattered and forgotten among the rubble and falling buildings, crushed by the gravitational forces of the Kryptonian machine, or otherwise broken, maimed, or killed in the cataclysmic confrontation that had taken place between the rogue Kryptonians.

If one considered any of the above to be losses, then Gotham had suffered greatly. And so had Bruce.

He stared at the window, lost in thought, and decided at last that it was not the unexpected light from the Mouille that had created such a sense of turbulence within him. Yet there was something unusual about it. Like dawn breaking, the light from the lamp had begun to fill the room with a glow that was warm, and comforting, and incredibly unusual for that time of night. Just out of sight beyond the corner, the light seemed to surge, growing brighter and brighter until it was impossible to ignore, and only when Bruce squinted and slid from the bed did the light extinguish with a pop and the tinkle of glass; the air was filled with an acrid scent, burnt metal, and in the few seconds it took for Bruce to adjust to the sudden darkness, a shadow slid unseen across the floor and disappeared. 

He got out of bed and cautiously made his way around the corner. In the light from the television he could see glass littering the floor at the base of the lamp. The Mouille was plugged in, emitting gentle wisps of smoke that faded into the darkness. A power surge would have explained such a thing quite easily… and yet Bruce, now very awake, easily recalled the stifling, oppressive darkness that he had fallen asleep in hours ago. The lamp hadn’t been on. The television still droned steadily, positing to the near-empty room a statement about the dangers of alien technology.

Bruce unplugged the lamp and caught a flash of movement in the dark glass; he turned and saw before him a figure with features awash in darkness, whose feet hovered inches above the floor and whose broad shoulders were outlined by the light from the television. A cape fluttered as though in a gentle breeze. The room seemed to hum with energy.

He felt the bite of glass in his heel as he stepped back.

“Bruce,” said Superman, speaking in a voice that felt uncomfortably, unreasonably intimate. “You have to listen to me.”

An icy wave of emotion rippled along Bruce’s spine and raised the hair on his arms; Bruce was not certain whether it was fear (had he come to threaten? to put a halt to Bruce’s activity?) or anger (what right did he have, begging for Bruce’s time?) or simply hatred (for being here, now, and how many had died?). He felt the heat of blood flowing freely from his heel and knew that somehow, even without explanation, the power surge that had burnt out the bulbs was Superman’s doing. Just as the news reruns in the background detailed his transgressions, he had now committed an unforgivable offense: obliterating the sanctity of his home.

Superman was responsible for so much damage, and had never atoned for any of it. No one on the planet could punish him for his misdeeds. No one on the planet could lift a finger against him and survive if he didn’t wish it. And Superman approached Bruce soundlessly in his home, the deep crimson of his boots and cape like a curtain of blood, a colour so dark it was nearly black. He had no need to physically step forward; he simply moved like a phantom suspended in the air, and yet the room seemed to shiver with his presence. Bruce could feel it, too. A creeping dread, if dread felt like weightlessness and crushing and rippling all at once. The ticking of the Doomsday Clock. Death given form.

“If I wanted it,” Superman said, low and insultingly soft, “you’d be dead already.”

Delicate glass crunched and cracked beneath Bruce’s bare feet, still warm from the light and now heated to boiling from Bruce’s blood, balancing out the sudden coolness against his back as he took another step away from Superman and met a pane of glass. From the outside, it would have looked as if Superman had simply willed him to stop moving; to Bruce, it felt as if the world itself had terminated in an invisible barrier, rendering him a fish in a glass bowl, ready to be plucked by the same hungry cat that blocked his only viable escape route.

Few things had chilled Bruce to the bone in recent years, and among them now was the image of Superman in his home, extending a hand capable of crushing rock and bone and steel, reaching for Bruce as a friend might—and in the span of a blink he was gone again, leaving an eerie stillness in his wake, a silence yawning and definite but for the shaky sound of Bruce’s breath, the soft voices of Gotham’s local news station, and the Mouille that stood several feet away from Bruce.

He blinked, confused by the light that now flooded the small portion of the house, and when he looked down he saw that no glass littered the floor. He lifted a foot, inspecting both his unbloodied heel and the empty, dark space of the house with equal suspicion.

And then he checked the doors, front and lakeside, and found that they were, as he had left them, safely locked.

There were no signs of Superman’s intrusion. No signs that Bruce had experienced anything other than a terrible fantasy.

A separate possibility.

He turned off the television on his way back to the opposite side of the house, glad to be rid of the background murmurings of Superman, eager to put the alien out of his mind… and yet he knew, even as he retrieved his phone and settled into bed and lay motionless, reviewing security footage of the silent and still lakeside home that seemed to reveal a troubled sleepwalker rousing from a particularly insidious dream, that Superman would not leave his mind for a very long time.

_ii. you are screaming far too loud to hear me swear_

“That thing you said earlier, about Superman. Can you elaborate on that? Off the record, I mean. This is a personal question, not for a sound bite.”

Clark had the distinct feeling that he’d already lost Bruce Wayne, whose expression was as vacant as his eyes were swift as they traveled over the crowd. They were inside Lex Luthor’s home in Metropolis, and unfortunately there were many things that were likely to draw the eye of a billionaire from across the bay. Clark did not count himself among them, not when there were beautiful people all around drinking champagne from flutes held by manicured fingers, wearing cufflinks gleaming on suits that cost as much as certain city sectors were allotted for a yearly budget by the Metropolis council, and—if Clark was not mistaken, though he rarely was—smelling of cologne and perfume and cocaine and other things he preferred not to guess at.

It was a prestigious affair. A genuine event. He knew what sort of people could be found here, and they did not interest him. But sometimes, local celebrities had something worth saying, and Clark was better than most at listening.

“Off the record,” Bruce Wayne repeated thoughtfully. The words sounded airy on his tongue, as though he had weighed them and found them uninteresting. He tossed a sideways glance at Clark, then returned to scanning the crowd. “Mm, Daily Planet, right. Tell me, ah... how long have you been in Metropolis?”

“Well, I grew up in Kansas, but I moved here about a year ago,” Clark replied. Wayne’s obvious inability to recall his name would have slid off his back like water from a duck, but he had paused for a moment too long. Either something had caught his attention, or he was working hard to feign obliviousness. “I guess you could say I’m from out of town, but I’ve been around long enough to pick up on some things.”

“You picked a hell of a time to show up. Now, I’d be willing to bet I can guess what you’re after, and you know, I don’t blame you. You don’t need to explain yourself to someone like me. Superman only showed up about a year ago, right? Leveled half the city. Lots of people with questions, only nobody seems to be asking the right ones.”

“Must have been before my time,” Clark said smoothly, dodging the question-slash-accusation. “But that line you said earlier, about how dangerous Superman was… you must have seen what was happening here in the city. I know your company lost people, but plenty more were saved.”

Wayne turned his head, and to Clark’s surprise, gave him a small, coy smile.

“You know that, do you? Say… Kansas, you said? Wasn’t there a town in Kansas that was almost obliterated?”

Something burbled in Bruce’s ear, a man’s voice, warped by technology. Clark had long ago perfected the art of putting on a poker face when presented with new information, but he struggled not to frown as Bruce shrugged and turned his attention briefly to a dolled-up passerby, while a voice coming from a small transmitter within his ear said: “Indeed. Quite a bit of destruction in the area, it seemed, even before the Kryptonian ships entered Metropolis.”

Bruce Wayne was evidently also practiced in the art of deception; nothing in the grand picture of his expression suggested that he’d heard a thing. 

“I know people needed to rebuild,” Clark said slowly. “Needed to hold funerals for bodies that they couldn’t find for weeks after. But compare that to the number of lives that could have been lost if he hadn’t stopped those ships… or the other Kryptonian. Someone could argue that he might have saved the planet from a greater danger.”

“Someone could. Someone could also say that if he hadn’t hidden himself on our planet, they might have destroyed Pluto, maybe, and we would’ve been none the wiser. Doesn’t change the fact that the Kryptonians would still be out there with their ships, doing the exact same thing to a different planet. He may have eliminated a different threat, but he’s still Kryptonian. You can raise a wolf alongside domesticated dogs, but it won’t lose its appetite, and you can’t pull its teeth. Meat is still meat, regardless of where it comes from.”

Clark grimaced. The list of metaphors had, at times, become almost commendably creative. “News reports stated that General Zod tried to murder a family. Superman stopped him. Why do you think the media shifted the focus away from a story like that?”

“I think they’re focusing on the simple fact that he killed a lot more people than just a family,” Bruce said. “I only saw one building full of my own employees come crashing down in front of me, so maybe my view could be considered myopic, but according to the news, he and Superman took down whatever that spaceship didn’t manage to pulverize.”

“Sources suggest Superman stopped Zod from killing those people. Do you think he made the right choice?”

“By killing his own people? Yeah, he’s a regular hometown hero. Listen, Planet, if the story you’re looking for is about Superman, go ask someone who can’t pay for physical therapy. Ask someone whose insurance skyrocketed after their car was flattened or their apartment sliced in half by short-range lasers. Ask someone who had to cremate a family when that alien machine’s gravity ray turned them into a flesh pancake, or the ones who never recovered a body because they couldn’t tell which mangled limbs belonged to who.”

He stopped speaking for a moment. The voice warbled mechanically again, too low for anyone but Clark and Bruce to hear. “Now won’t that be a kind headline in the tabloids,” the voice said. “Bruce Wayne, philanthropist and poet.” 

Bruce Wayne was rather good at pretending nobody was speaking to him; his amusement only crept as far as the crow’s feet that lined his eyes and did not spill over the rest of his face, which maintained some muted hostility that was, although he did not realize it, both directly and indirectly aimed at Clark. He seemed to be hiding more than that; his gaze was restless, sweeping over the crowd as though he might be able to look through them.

Clark wondered for only a moment who was speaking into his ear, but was distracted by another sound: a high-pitched whine, a ringing that sounded like no bell or whistle he’d ever heard.

He turned his head to the side, triangulating the position of the sound, and realized that it was coming from behind the great glass facade of Alexander Luthor’s home.

Beyond the glass wall, shielded from the partygoers by the reflection of the mansion’s interior, Clark saw a shadow standing in the yard: tall, broad-shouldered, and darker than the night surrounding it, a figure with two piercing flames for eyes watched silently, and Clark felt a light sweat break out along his back and hairline.

“I, uh… I have to disagree with you, Mr. Wayne. And I take issue with your metaphor. Wolves may be dangerous by comparison, but only out of necessity. They don’t need to recognize or acknowledge the cost of brutality, but we have a choice.”

“So we can choose to ignore it.”

“Like the Gotham vigilante has?”

There was a chuckle from the communication device in Wayne’s ear. Clark blinked and realized that he had nearly forgotten about it. Wayne obviously hadn’t, though he did not seem to share in his remote companion’s amusement.

“Here’s the thing—”

“Or we can choose to acknowledge it for what it is, like Superman,” Clark interrupted.

Wayne turned, glanced around the room with practiced subtlety, and finally looked directly at Clark. His eyes skimmed Clark’s front, followed the line of his lanyard, and settled somewhat unsettlingly on his ID tag.

“I seem to remember Luthor called you by name… Clark Kent. Must’ve been one hell of a year for you in Metropolis, to get on his good side.”

Clark frowned, uncertain of Wayne’s sudden interest and unable to determine precisely what a personal relationship with Lex Luthor might look like to someone like Bruce Wayne. They clearly were familiar, if only in the way that billionaires who ran opposing businesses could be familiar. Perhaps neutrality could be beneficial. Or perhaps not. It would be a waste of time to attempt to change Wayne’s mind, and Clark had no need for a billionaire sponsor.

“We don’t know each other,” he said slowly. “I… that conversation earlier was our first. I’ve never spoken to him before. I’m just covering the event.”

Wayne gave him a look that suggested dubiousness, then melted into something that resembled pity. “Well, I’ve known him for a while. I’ll save you some hours of digging and eventual disappointment, though. Guys like him? Lotta money, lotta hot air, but he’s smart. Smarter than you and me both. You want to dance with someone like him, you better learn not to tread on any toes. If I were you, I’d go home and start working on some on-the-record material. This time tomorrow, nobody here will be able to remember if they actually said it or not. Including me.”

As Wayne spoke, Clark’s attention drifted back to the yard where the figure still stood. 

“Thank you for your honesty, Mr. Wayne,” he said distractedly, and swiftly turned away; only a single person made any attempt to stop him from seeking out any sort of back entrance, a woman whose glittering dress and shoes he did not stop to examine in detail, and found himself nearly running into the cool air outside Luthor’s mansion. His chest burned with that familiar and unwelcome sensation that had plagued him since Zod’s death, and he swallowed it down with the chill, steeling himself against the sudden primal terror that gripped him.

The hair on the backs of his arms stood on end, and when he turned toward the pristine glass of the manor doors and the sterile white light within he expected to see, standing among the mingling socialites, something tall, and dark, and terrible—and it occurred to him in that moment that he had never truly seen the Burning Man in the light, that eliminating shadow and all of the horrors that lay within were the key to safety. Of course the Burning Man couldn’t haunt him in the day, couldn’t stand the sight of his heat vision, fled from the light like a bat out of hell.

But he couldn’t stay in the shadows forever. He had been robbed of that opportunity by General Zod and by his own very nature.

There was no man burning among the socialites, no gap in reality that seemed to contain a person-shaped inferno. There was only Bruce Wayne, the expert ventriloquist, speaking subvocally with minimal facial movement to a voice that Clark had no current interest in pinpointing.

He had other things to worry about.

•

Within the depths of the personal residence of Alexander Luthor Junior, Bruce Wayne paused with his fingers wrapped around the cool metal of a data leech to look up as something caught his eye: beyond the glass doors, near the top of the staircase, two red boots glittered in the austere lighting, too conspicuous to be anything but alien.

Bruce slipped the leech into his pocket and turned slowly to the stairs; the figure had taken a step down, revealing another few inches of tessellated blue above the shin, and suddenly the light began to flicker.

“Alfred,” Bruce whispered, and flinched away and bared his teeth as the wireless transmitter in his ear emitted a feedback whine so loud and sharp that it hurt. He bared his teeth as the whine ceased, and glanced up and realized that in the split second it had taken him to look away, Superman had disappeared, and on cue the manor and its grounds shuddered as somewhere outside thunder rent the air.

“—On? Bruce? Are you still there? ” 

“I’m here,” Bruce said. “I’ve got the leech.” His ear still ached terribly from the feedback, and as he glanced toward the staircase, now empty behind the glass, the fluorescent light buzzing faintly above the hum of machinery, he felt cold fingernails of terror and hatred drag down his spine. Something cruel gnawed at his insides, something violent and angry and vengeful; he’d spent too long discussing Superman tonight, foolishly, and he would be foolish still to assume that Superman, who seemed omnipresent and omniscient at times, could not sense from elsewhere in the world that he had powerful enemies. There was no promise that the alien would not simply appear to spite him.

“Good,” Alfred said. “Now I believe it’s best if you—”

He stopped mid-sentence; a noise that sounded muted and yet distinct, an explosion—a sonic boom?—drowned out all noise in Bruce’s ear, and became a shriek so horrible that it seemed to turn his insides to ice. _Alfred,_ he thought. Alfred—

and woke suddenly and silently, chest heaving like a bellows. All else in the lakeside home still slumbered; even the leaves on the trees beyond the walls lay still in the absence of a breeze, and the fraction of a moon visible in the night sky was mirrored all but perfectly on the glass-like surface of the lake.

“You,” said a voice softly.

Bruce turned his head. He had woken from other dreams this way, and some part of him expected to do so again—to turn and look and find that he had not yet opened his eyes, that the figures he saw were painted inside his eyelids in splashes of dream-eaten colour.

He turned his head. He saw Clark. Superman, resplendent in his suit and cape and boots, standing over the bed like a spectre in blue and red, glittering and muted in colour by the dark and shadow.

Part of Bruce thought to reach for the lamp, to throw his face into sharp relief, to prove that it was not a trick of the imagination.

Part of Bruce was not yet ready for him to disappear.

“I’m not dreaming, am I?”

He was; he must have been, for as soon as he thought to turn on the light, the lamp that sat in the corner of the building—the same Mouille that he had relocated from the living room after an unexplained power surge had shattered its bulbs—flickered to life, chasing back the shadow and revealing the face of Clark. Not the version of Clark he recalled from his dreams, not the journalist who he had unknowingly insulted months before, but Clark as he remembered him on the rooftop that fateful night. The night he’d come to Bruce dripping with rainwater, his mouth set in a grim line, begging for help that would nearly never come.

And sad. He looked strangely, unspeakably sad.

The mattress sank as Clark lowered himself onto the edge of it, and the light hummed with pleasure as Clark met his gaze.

Too many times he’d had this dream. A false awakening, a promise slipping through his fingers like smoke.

Like a ghost.

“I can’t do this,” Bruce whispered. “You can’t be here.”

Disbelief rolled easily from his tongue. He had forged a better armour from denial, discovered a protection better than any that hope could give. Bruce could not have started this conversation any other way, not now; this was a dream he knew as well as his own name, and while his mind had supplied him with so many opportunities to right his wrongs, he had not yet discovered a greeting that felt appropriate. Apologies rarely seemed sufficient. Questions about the rational and irrational both were too broad, too specific, never about the right thing. Never enough.

“You’re dead,” Bruce said again. To wear hope would be to wear a gleaming suit with a hole directly over the chest. Too well, he knew that feeling. He had fortified his vulnerabilities in the past years with grim symbols of his own. In his dreams, Superman had exploited them. Now, self-preservation had him gripped in its teeth, and Bruce ached to bloody himself enough to pull free.

Clark looked away from him, looked down as though ashamed, and exhaled softly.

“Honestly, I think I was.”

Bruce swallowed. Clark’s voice was so clear. Something in the foundation of Bruce’s defenses shuddered and cracked.

“Was,” he said, and laughed hollowly. “Was? You know what this is. Only something Kryptonian can kill a Kryptonian. The only way you could be here is...”

He half-expected his hand to pass through Clark’s arm when he reached out, to pass through it like glittering pixels in a hologram, but his fingertips brushed textured fabric. He drew back and hovered, hesitant, like a hummingbird preparing to land upon a feeder.

It was not the first time he had felt the warmth of Clark’s arm and opened his eyes to find nothing there. It always felt so real.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Clark said quietly. He lifted his gaze and met Bruce’s again, and Bruce felt a surge of sorrow for the helplessness in his eyes. “I can’t remember.”

The urge was too strong. Hope gnawed at Bruce’s chest. He let his fingertips brush along the edge of Clark’s forearm. The Kryptonian fabric felt precisely as he remembered it. All those months ago, when it had been his responsibility to fold the suit and cape and store them for safekeeping, he had memorized the tessellation with his fingertips and had learned the outline of a language he would never know.

He remembered such sensations vividly. And it was the only thing keeping him from asking whether he was speaking to a living, breathing person. “Are you…?”

Clark tilted his head and waited.

“There’s so much I want to ask,” Bruce said softly. His eyes found the centre of the sigil, the shield that had given Superman his name. He hadn’t thought to look at it before. It was whole, scarlet and gold. “How long have you been here? Did you… did you heal? Were you in pain?”

Clark smiled suddenly. His face softened and became—sheepish, if Bruce had to describe it, and he ducked his head with a shy chuckle. He almost seemed to glow in the gentle lamplight; Bruce’s attention was focused on his expression, and so the brightness of the lightbulbs escaped him temporarily, became extraneous sensory input. As far as he was concerned, there was only Clark, sitting next to him in an entirely new light.

But the light grew brighter. He simply didn’t notice.

“I wasn’t. Not really. And I hope you can forgive me.”

Bruce gave a soft huff, incredulity and relief in a single breath. “You don’t have anything to apologize for. Everything that happened… it was my fault. I put you in greater danger. The spear, the gas, I could have had more to use on the…”

He rarely faltered, but he had never expected to have the chance to speak with Clark face-to-face. He had never thought that he would feel the Kryptonian suit beneath his fingers again. His optimism, that terrible sense of self-preservation, had never revealed Clark to him quite like this. In all of his dreams, neither he nor Clark had ever survived being so close.

Wordlessly, he leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Clark’s shoulders. He squeezed tightly, selfishly, as though expecting that Clark would suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke and relieve him of the opportunity.

And he pretended not to tremble when Clark lifted a hand and rested it on his back.

“I forgive you,” Clark said, and Bruce squeezed him tighter, opened his eyes, and shuddered.

In the night, when the only light came from inside Bruce’s home, the glass turned the interior into a house of mirrors; drapery tracks recessed in the ceiling lined the perimeter of the house, for days when light could not be permitted to filter in, but when the curtains were not drawn the world beyond seemed to disappear, and Bruce was often left in the company of his own solemn reflection.

Now, he saw himself and Clark both. And a third figure, standing behind the bed, a void in the light that took the shape of a human figure.

He turned. Clark released him wordlessly, and Bruce spun to stare at the space where the figure had stood. He braced for something worse than a reflection—an intruder, an attack, something more horrifying than the things even his mind could conjure up—and found nothing instead. No figure stood in the house, and the light from the lamp obscured any person, human or otherwise, that may have stood beyond the glass.

The light from the lamp also obscured much of Clark’s reflection. All of it, in fact. And he realized that the light from the Mouille, the lamp that seemed to have taken on a life of its own, still stood around the corner just beyond view. And still, despite the hour, despite the sun’s absence and the dark sky beyond the glowing walls of the house, the light grew brighter.

“You saw it too,” Clark said behind him. “Like a shadow.”

Bruce’s heart felt leaden. 

“You’re not here,” he told his solitary reflection. “You’re dead.”

“Honestly,” Clark said, “I think I was.”

The whine of electricity, previously audible, finally reached Bruce. One by one, lights flickered to life around him, lending their voices to the chorus: the lamps on either side of Bruce’s bed splashed brilliant light across the floor, and the recessed lights of the ceiling illuminated the house, activating at a stilted, unnatural pace. The televisions in the hallways hummed with static. A sourceless light emanated from the core structure above Bruce’s head like a rectangular halo.

For a single moment, the house glowed brighter than it ever had; the light gleamed on the calm surface of the lake, giving the exterior of the house the appearance of a great, glowing solarium.

And all at once the bulbs of the lamps shattered, the televisions shorted and flickered off, and the light fled the room. Darkness rushed to fill the space, and when Bruce opened his eyes, Clark was gone.

The house sat silent, entirely undisturbed save for the scent of something burnt—and that too slipped away as Bruce slipped out of bed, dissipating like the last vestiges of a dream withdrawing from the conscious mind, leaving only the realization that he had been alone, yet again, all along.

•

The silence was agonizing.

It had been a late night and the morning was off to a terrible start, as work mornings often could be after the sorts of evenings Clark had grown accustomed to. In fact, Clark had arrived late to work and had only avoided being flayed publicly at his cubicle by Perry by deploying calculated and oft-practiced evasive maneuvers that involved moving as swiftly as possible (for a human) through the office and into the bathroom. He’d arrived mere milliseconds before Perry had barrelled through the bullpen, but hadn’t escaped punishment. Instead, he’d been flayed semi-publicly in the break room in front of Jay, the sports editor, who had with visible discomfort feigned utter obliviousness with his headphones in and something flickering across the screen of his phone while Perry shredded Clark with the terrible and near-cartoonish ferocity of the Tasmanian Devil.

It did nothing to help his focus. He hadn’t slept, and it was true that Clark required less sleep than most, but it didn’t seem to matter. The words on his computer screen that should have resembled a respectful and objective article about the upcoming municipal elections blurred before his eyes, warping under his unfocused gaze until the article he was actively failing to write resembled little more than an amorphous Rorschach text-blob.

He’d closed his eyes and then closed out the entire office, had taken a deep breath, and had focused on the black of his mind instead, settling into the dark that came only with years of careful focus, where it was no longer possible to scan through flesh and bone and steel; where before he would have seen the after-image of the computer monitor seared into his retinas, now he saw only shadow, a blissful absence of anything, the dark of unseeing. 

This time, burning coals watched him from the backs of his own eyelids. 

He’d reached for a piece of paper with no small amount of determination, and now Lois held the result in her hand and was scrutinizing the humanoid shape that he had tried to recreate. Somehow, the pen’s black ink simply didn’t seem dark enough, and he had felt too silly seeking out a red pen for the obvious details, but he’d needed to record it somehow—take the image from his own mind and place it on the paper, make it tangible at last.

Things that were tangible were easier to confront. Easier to punch, at least.

Lois continued to study the portrait. Clark simply looked away.

It wasn’t as though he had drawn something horrific. The Burning Man, fictitious or not, did not seem nearly as frightening on paper, nor did Clark expect to see him during the way. Still, something unsettled him about the image. Even the act of drawing it had filled Clark with a sense of dread, as though the ink had been something more sinister than that as it had been splashed across the page. It was not the featureless face with symbolic empty holes for eyes that made him uneasy, Clark mused as he fought the instinct to chew on a thumbnail. It was the ease with which he’d traced that shape, drawing its nonfeatures with a familiarity that suggested he had seen this face, knew it as well as his own. He imagined this must have been another odd Rorschach test of sorts—divine a personality trait from the sentient shadow!

Jonathan would have enjoyed that. Clark had no need for a therapist as a child. Why would he have? He wasn’t from this world. His fears could not have been, either.

“So you think that… whatever this is… it’s following you?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so. I don’t even know if it’s real, but it’s what I’ve been seeing. Ever since I was a kid, it’s always been there. Always exactly like that. Mom says I used to have these nightmares, but lately… I’m not sure.” Clark settled back into an ancient metal office chair that creaked under his weight. They were alone for now, and he felt more comfortable in almost every way when he was alone. More recently, he had noticed that fewer eyes on him meant a greater sense of ease. “The thing is… do you remember back when I first started working at the Planet?”

Alarm registered on Lois’s face, then recognition, settling at last into the sort of expression that said ‘why wouldn’t you tell me about these nightmares after all this time?’ as plainly as it said ‘I’m determined to figure this out, because getting to the bottom of things is what I do’. 

“Yeah, I do.” 

“I asked you to try and help me find footage from BZ Day. Of what happened in the Station.”

“Yeah. You never told me what it was about.”

Clark nodded in the direction of the dark figure on the sheet.

“So, when I was younger, I used to see this… thing. Just like that. And I’d forgotten about it, I guess. Until everything happened with Zod, it had actually been… decades, even, since I even thought about it. But after what happened in the Station, I started thinking… I mean, whenever these dreams were going on, back when I was a kid, my dad used to say that it was something my mind made up. Something in me was afraid of myself, and that was how it manifested.”

Lois nodded. Her face gave away nothing.

“The reason I wanted to see the footage was... I started to wonder, after the Station… what if that’s what those people saw, too? When they looked at him, at General Zod or me, what did they see besides the… hatred in his eyes? The destruction?”

“It’s not hatred when you do it, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s completely different, Clark. You have to know that those people saw you as a hero.”

“Maybe they did. But not everyone saw that. A lot of people saw what we could do, and it didn’t matter whether we did them because we hated people or not. A gaze like that is death for someone like them. Or someone like you. People haven’t forgotten what happened.”

Clark had never managed to access footage from when he had murdered General Zod in Metropolis Central Station, but social media had caught wind of the first-hand accounts of the civilians that he’d saved. Photographs had been digitally altered and painted over. Among the countless memes, the anti-alien, pro-human sentiments, and the speculation were the portraits: art in all mediums, Superman and Zod from Krypton, mouths frozen wide in screams of rage and desperation, with eye sockets flaring like molten lava.

He hadn’t slept properly for weeks after, and had not used that particular gift, as his father might have described it, for several months. Even when no-one was watching.

“Anyway…” Clark cleared his throat and took a breath. ”Every time I see it, him, whatever it is, it’s always… it feels like he’s shadowing me. Not like my own shadow, but like he’s following me, haunting me for some reason. And I can’t figure it out, if it’s part of my imagination or something that’s… I don’t know, manifesting, or what. It’s like…” He gestured and made a frustrated noise. “If I try too hard to look at him, he blurs and becomes… indistinct. Like smoke. Like he’s made out of nothing but a kid’s worst nightmare, and yet he’s there. I can feel him, whatever he’s doing to me. And I hate the way it feels because nobody else can see it. I know it sounds crazy, Lo, but…”

“Everything’s crazy with you,” Lois said, giving him a kinder smile than his illustration and uncertain rambling warranted. “And nothing’s crazy.”

It was the sort of strange rhetorical statement that much of the world had begun to express, in various ways and with varying degrees of awe and wonderment, since General Zod had first hijacked the planet’s airwaves. Lois was not usually prone to statements like these, being as well-spoken and practical as she was; Clark knew that it was solely meant to put him at ease while she came up with something better, something that could be logical and reassuring and affirming all at once.

She inhaled as if to add something else, and at that moment the door slammed open as Perry blew through like a hurricane.

“Enos,” he barked, having spent a fraction of a second identifying Clark and Lois (and evidently deciding that their business was not his own). “He was supposed to have a file on my desk in fifteen minutes and that was twenty minutes ago. Have either of you seen him?”

Clark shook his head, and Lois asked, “Have you tried the men’s room?”

Perry narrowed his eyes. Lois lifted a hand and pointed in the approximate direction of the office bathrooms, then seemed to notice that she had lifted Clark’s drawing in the process.

Perry seemed to notice it too. His gaze lingered for just a moment too long on it, then darted immediately back to Clark. “Try the men’s room, she says. Have you tried going back to work, Miss Lane, or are we now putting up wanted posters like it’s the goddamn wild west?”

“I’m on my lunch break,” Lois said. 

“Great! We have a room for that,” Perry said, then turned his gaze on Clark, who saw Lois crumple up the paper and stuff it into her pocket for safekeeping. “And _you_ …”

“We’re trying to have a conversation, Perry. I’m not going to keep him for much longer. Just give us a minute, please.”

Perry looked at Clark for a moment, worked his jaw, and nodded. If he noticed anything in Clark’s expression, or had any suspicions about the paper that had simply vanished, he seemed to be holding back; Clark was not sure whether it was Lois he had to thank, or if the creeping sense of discomfort that had plagued him all day had finally latched onto Perry, too.

“Just get back to work,” he said after a moment, then closed the door behind him with just enough force to make it seem like an order.

•

At the Nicholson Terminal & Docks Company, Lex Luthor’s radioactive Kryptonian mineral was being transported from the White Portuguese into a nondescript cargo truck. Dusk had only just given way to night, a shift so recent that a strip of dull brownish-red still coloured a portion of the horizon like dried blood, but even with a mostly-clear sky there were still long shadows stretching toward the loading bay from all corners, like dark hands creeping in to claim the cargo. This would work to Bruce’s advantage. The shadows always did.

Bruce had pulled himself atop the gantry crane and remained statuesque for close to half an hour now, watching from the scope of his tracer rifle, in order to keep a close eye on the proceedings; security had not noticed him, nor had any of the crew removing the goods from the ship. All Bruce had to do was wait, and eager though he was to get his hands on the special import, he felt a certain thrill in knowing that the situation was well under control. He felt like a spider watching over a web; if his prey escaped, one tug on a near-invisible thread was all that he required to follow his target. The escort team would take a tracking beacon directly to the mineral’s final destination if Bruce failed to obtain it.

He had nothing to worry about. Nothing, save for—

a shadow that slid across Bruce’s back, silent and unseen until it blotted out the light from the moon and raised the hair across Bruce’s body. 

_How odd_ , he thought. And it was unusual for Superman to arrive that way, materializing out of the black of the night; there had been no thunderous boom nor shuddering of the sky, no supersonic whistle of air moving over a target that moved too quickly for the human eye to see. Not even the gentle rustle of fabric in the wind had given him away, and Bruce knew that sound intimately. Only Bruce’s instincts had notified him that anything was out of place, and his instincts had been wrong before. He could be wrong now. He might turn to find nothing, shivering in the breeze with nothing but his paranoia hanging over him.

He turned.

Superman stood perfectly still in the sky. Even his cape was unaffected by the breeze, hanging limply as though he were a statue suspended by invisible wires.

Bruce’s skin prickled uncomfortably beneath his armour, and he felt the layers of his suit as acutely as if he were wearing a suit of sandpaper. The blood in his bones felt as if it had flash-frozen. He had prepared for almost anything tonight, but he had not prepared for this.

Superman stared at him, his face cold, stiff, emotionless. The light from the docks far below glinted in his eyes, and they too were fixed downward, unblinking, on Bruce.

Bruce had no time to think.

His mission had been compromised.

He turned slowly and aimed his tracker rifle at Superman’s chest.

“They say Kryptonians are invincible,” he whispered. Too loud and they might hear him below. Too quiet, and Superman might not hear. And he couldn’t risk that. “Bullets bounce off like pennies. Missiles like firecrackers. Just light and hot air. Can’t be burned, drowned, pierced, cut… except by your own.”

Bruce’s heart thundered in his chest, and the roar filtered out Alfred’s voice almost entirely. He was saying something, warning Bruce, but what he was saying wasn’t important.

Superman’s face remained utterly insouciant.

“What would I find inside your chest?” His voice was a whisper. Adrenaline made him feel electric. His finger slid across the trigger of the rifle. “I’d like to find out.”

“This is my world,” Superman said.

The air seemed to crackle between them. Bruce fired.

The tracker, aimed directly at the alien’s chest, rocketed into the darkness between them and was lost.

There are moments in time that are often said to have occurred in slow motion. Moments of trauma. Accidents. Before pain, before impact, before something life-altering, time perception appears to warp; overactivity of the amygdala, a response of the sympathetic nervous system, activation of the cingulate cortex. The reasons why are rarely important in the moment. The brain simply catches the sensory input, wraps it up in a bow, and preserves the memory for later. 

This is the memory that Bruce would later recall.

Superman’s eyes began to glow.

Under any other circumstances—such as from a safe distance, well out of the blast radius—Bruce would have paused to examine the building intensity of light behind Superman’s face, to watch his eye sockets heat up until his eyes burned like molten magma. Something strange hung in the air, the scent of burning, like scorched flesh, but that may have been something invented by Bruce’s imagination. He didn’t need to invent what would happen next. A terrible power lay behind those eyes. Bruce had seen it firsthand, had watched it topple buildings, snuff lives. 

Superman’s eyes were red. The colour of blood. The colour of cold, unforgiving fury.

There was nothing Bruce could do in the face of certain death. He was at the bottom of the food chain, a field mouse in the shadow of an owl.

So he did what food did.

There was no longer any way to verify whether Superman intended to kill him; Bruce had already dropped into a nosedive from the top of the crane and was hurtling downward, away from Superman and away from the truck that held the Kryptonian cargo. He veered aside at the last moment, still undetected by the security detail that had likely been hired by Luthor himself to patrol the area where the White Portuguese had docked, and with the wind whipping at his cape he weaved his way down and around the backside of the Nicholson Co. terminal. He did not stop to see whether Superman had given chase, and instead made his way to the warehouse’s interior, taking advantage of the dark to shield himself from prying eyes. Unfortunately, since his tracker had been pulverised on the impermeable exterior of Superman’s chest—or worse, dodged at such a speed that he had not noticed it whizzing out into Gotham Bay—he would now need to follow the delivery truck manually.

Fortunately, he was alive.

For now.

Several minutes later, Superman stood amid smoke and flame, having crumpled a significant portion of the Batmobile on impact and more with his bare hands. He stared down at Bruce with that same implacable gaze, only now the fire illuminated his face, revealing the precise lines of his disapproval.

Over the crackling fire of Gotham City Gas burning, the tires of the decimated yet functional transport truck containing Luthor’s mineral squealed in the distance, the engine roaring like a beast in the night as it pulled around a corner and out of sight. 

The kryptonite was out of Bruce’s grasp, and he hadn’t even managed to fire off a tracker.

This time Superman spoke. The furious thundering of Bruce’s heart and the fire-dampening spray hissing from the Batmobile’s damaged interior drowned it out, but the sound of Superman’s voice still registered as a threat greater than any other, and Bruce was not foolish enough to think that Superman would drop in simply to say hello. 

Maybe he was in danger after all. His intelligence and good reasoning, still remembering the red death illuminating Superman’s dark eyes, told him that it would be smarter to flee. Superman had allowed him to escape before. If he truly considered Bruce a threat, he would have been reduced to cinders atop the crane, and would likely still floating to the streets of Gotham in the form of ashes. He was being offered a chance to leave.

“Consider this mercy,” Superman said, and Bruce felt that strange spark between them once more. So few things made him feel this alive.

“This world doesn’t belong to you,” he said, climbing to his full height. He even managed a slow, ghastly smile. “You think you can live here peacefully? On a planet that was never meant for you? Pretend to protect a city you nearly wiped off the map?”

Superman’s brow wrinkled faintly. His eyes narrowed, focused on the symbol on Bruce’s chest, then lifted to meet his gaze. There was no trace of that light in them now; they were dark, sober. Convincingly human. He even looked, if only for a fraction of a second, as if he were truly considering Bruce’s words.

_We have a choice_ , said a voice in Bruce’s head.

Superman stared at him for a moment longer, then snorted and shook his head, a movement so slight and derisive that Bruce’s adrenaline-fueled confidence melted into a searing anger.

Then Superman turned away. He looked to the sky, and the Batmobile shuddered and groaned as Superman took flight, leaving Bruce standing among the burning fuel and smoking, sparking shell of his vehicle.

_iii. you’ll feel my fingers down your back_

There was nothing that could have saved Jonathan Kent. There was no way he could have lived.

No, Clark didn’t believe that. It wasn’t true that his father had been a helpless victim of a terrible tragedy, a freak accident. It wasn’t true that he couldn’t have lived. He could have; he could easily have been saved, and Clark had done it many times over, again and again in the theatre of his mind. He could have been saved, and he had not been, and so there was little that could be done for such a loss; his grief was tied so directly to Clark’s guilt that when one string was plucked, the other responded in kind. Like strumming the strands of a spider’s web. It all led back to him.

Clark’s stoicism began to crumble partway through the interment. It helped to know that his mother was so strong, so supportive, and so understanding of his feelings. She had done her best to assure him that there was nothing that he could have done, and she had allowed him to grieve all the same, knowing that it was not the entire truth.

When he turned and strode away from the small graveside gathering, fighting to keep down the lump rising in his throat, Martha simply let him go. It was not until later that he would realize that it was not his inability to be present that saddened her, nor was it the slowly-descending coffin that contained Jonathan Kent’s body that caused her to cry then. Neither would speak of it for some time, each eventually agreeing that there was nothing that could be said, but Clark would eventually apologize for not being there, and Martha would tell him that there was no unforgivable sin in grieving.

Shouldering his way carefully through the crowd, Clark weaved toward the outside of the cemetery, where the open gates led to a path through the field. The Kent farm was visible from here, with its old tin roof shining in the sun, the slow-turning spokes of the windmill creaking in the distance. It was too nice a day for a funeral, and yet the clear skies did nothing to ease the crushing helplessness that had risen in Clark. It was one thing to know that his father was in that box, but to see it in the grave… to know that they might have resolved their argument, might have gone home and carried on as if nothing had ever happened, might have spent this very moment together mowing the lawn or discussing football scores or speculating on the year’s crop yield...

He clutched at his chest. His heartbeat had taken on a frantic pace, and his lungs felt as though they were being crushed; it was a panic attack, he would think later, when the weight had lifted and left him with renewed guilt, old and new, bolstered by his inability to sit through a single damned funeral. A simple panic attack, because his father had died and he could have stopped it. He could have saved him. He could have saved so many people. It would’ve taken him as much effort to push the storm aside as it would take anyone else to blow up a balloon. Jonathan had died as he had lived, trying to protect Clark from any threat that would seek to tear him down, and could have been saved if only Clark hadn’t been so damn afraid.

He didn’t question it in the moment. He fought it, for it simply hurt to breathe and it felt as if his heard would burst and it felt too strange not to acknowledge it, not to fight against it.

He wondered, bracing himself against the metal of the Smallville Cemetery gate, if it was what dying felt like.

He doubled over and pressed his fist against his chest, hoping that the pressure would override the sudden, piercing anger. Had Jonathan trusted him, trusted the world enough to welcome him into it—or at least trusted that it would be kind enough to forget him if he had only done it that once, if he had only—

a sob escaped him. He squeezed his eyes shut and shut out the rest of the world—shut out the pastor reciting from the bible, shut out the whisper of wind through the crops in the field, shut out the rumble of airplanes overhead and the sniffling among the crowd and the crying of his mother, who had heard her son’s anguish and cried freely with him. He shut out all that he could shut out.

And he did not notice the shadow that slid over him. It did not touch the rest of the cemetery, did not block out the sun, did not make a noise or rustle the grass as it moved. Even the feeling of despair that threatened to overwhelm Clark now could not have intensified any further upon the arrival of the apparition, and so Clark, shaking with suppressed emotion, did not even notice its presence.

It simply stood, mouth open wide in a soundless, tormented wail, and watched him cry.

•

“Clark Kent,” said Perry White, folding his hands upon his desk. “What can I do for you?”

Clark shut the door behind himself. “Hi, Mr. White. I have a… a minor request I wanted to run by you.”

Perry waited for as long as Perry often waited for anyone to finish their sentence—that is to say, he didn’t wait at all. “Spit it out, Kent. What’re you requesting? A coffee break? A standing desk? A raise? ‘Cause if so, I’ve got some news for you.”

“No, not a raise,” Clark said. He took a seat in front of Perry’s desk and tried to make himself shrink into the chair. He was slowly getting better at the physicality that appealing to his employer required. He was also getting better at asking the right questions. His job required it, of course. “I’m looking for some footage. Of Superman. Specifically, CCTV footage from, uh… from the Black Zero event.”

“Footage of Superman,” Perry repeated. Clark nodded, and Perry, after considering it for a moment, made a sound that was neither a snort nor a chuckle, but conveyed both amusement and disbelief. “Yeah. Sure. Let me pull up my folder full of Top Secret Alien Surveillance Footage that I got from Area 51. You want footage of anyone else while I’m at it? Martin the Martian? Yoda?”

Clark’s expression was neither a smile nor a grimace. “Of course, sir.”

“Kent, it’s your second week on the job. If you don’t stop calling me sir, I’ll make sure you don’t stick around long enough to see a third.” He followed Clark with his eyes as Clark stood, then sighed. “Okay, hang on. What the hell do you need surveillance footage on Superman for anyway? This can’t be for any story you’re planning to publish.”

“It’s not for a story. We’re already writing about Superman, sir.”

“ _You_ ,” Perry said slowly, “are not.”

“I’m not,” Clark agreed. _Other_ people were writing about Superman. Clark was writing about the reported decrease in crime after the Black Zero event in areas where crime—unspecified crime as of yet, since it was his job to report what kind—and was doing his best to find a way determine whether the crime rate was falling because small-time criminals were terrified of being caught by Superman, or whether the rate of arrests and reports were falling because much of the city had been reduced to rubble and there were more important things to worry about than petty crimes. Nobody had so much as looted in the past few weeks. “It’s… personal. I guess.”

Perry surveyed him with interest. Clark felt as if they were waiting on a balloon to pop. “What sort of footage are you looking to get your hands on?”

“Metropolis Central Station.”

Perry sank back in his chair. “Sorry, Kent. I can’t authorize that kind of release, and I don’t recommend you go snooping anywhere near that station right now. But if you find any camera footage from someone who was there when it happened, or someone who might have been in the area at the time, maybe they can help you.”

“Thanks, Perry.”

Dejected, Clark returned to his cubicle, which still looked about as lived-in as it had when he’d first started at the Planet. Thus far, he had only managed to put up a photo frame that featured himself and his mother inside, and it formed a paltry display compared to the messy, knickknack-laden desks of senior editors and other reporters who had been at the Planet for far longer than he had. But he was quite proud of it. The rest of his workstation, while not sparkling clean, was still fairly tidy and mostly bare, save for a few sticky notes he’d attached to the cubicle wall. He hadn’t had enough assignments yet to really know what setup would work best for him. He hadn’t really had a job for this long in quite a long time.

No, he’d never had a job like this, period. He was learning quickly, and he did have some skill to boast about. It helped, though, having a mentor on the job.

After a few minutes at his computer, a flash of movement above the wall of the cubicle caught his eye; Lois had just come in from the rain and was making a beeline for him, carrying a cup of coffee from a local brand that Clark didn’t recognize and dripping water all over the floor in the process.

“Everything okay? You look sad. What happened?”

“This is my focusing face.”

“So you’re focusing on being sad?”

The humour helped. Clark chuckled and warmed his hands on the paper cup. Lois blew on her own beverage to cool it down, and Clark paused to inhale the steam curling out of the lid before setting it on the desk. Coffee wouldn’t do much to wake him up, or inspire him, or whatever everyone else was using it for, but he appreciated any small gesture that anyone in the office threw his way. “Thanks. Listen, I have this... I’ve got a favour to ask. I don’t know if you can help. I tried asking Perry and he just shot it down.”

Lois cocked a brow and leaned both forearms on the cubicle. Her expression morphed quickly into one of uncertainty as Clark explained his request.

“Not so sure about that one, Smallville.” Lois glanced around, lowered her voice, and leaned in closer. “Did something happen? Did something new come out about it? Are people saying anything?”

Clark pretended to look at his screen. There was a blinking cursor, half a dozen open tabs, and little else of interest. “No, nothing like that. It’s for something personal.”

“Clark.”

“It’s okay, really. I don’t _need_ the footage for anything. I just wanted to…” He lapsed into silence, then shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Is it about those people? We can find out who they were. Track them down and interview them, if you want.”

“It’s not important,” Clark said, then softened, making an apologetic face. “I mean it, Lo. I mean… Miss Lane.”

He glanced up at her and held her gaze, hoping to convince without words, and after a moment she gave him a small smile. She was unconvinced, obviously, but they knew better than to hash out these sorts of things in public. Clark was still new, and Lois was, as far as anyone else was concerned, simply trying to show him how to safely get his feet wet. Most topics were unsafe for them to bring up in public: Superman, Black Zero, General Zod, and so on. In fact, Clark had done so well not bringing Superman up for the first week that someone had asked him, rather incredulously, whether he’d simply moved to Metropolis after the event and assumed the alien ship had always been there.

“...Okay,” Lois said after a moment. “Then I suppose I’ll let you get back to your… crime statistics?”

Clark turned the screen away as she leaned in to inspect his progress. “It’s important to tell people what’s really going on in their city,” he said, pleased by the smile that was slowly beginning to take over Lois’s face. “You wouldn’t believe what Superman has done to deter criminal activity.”

Two cubicles over, hidden from view, a man that Clark had not yet learned the name of laughed. “No kidding. Wait ‘til you hear about the guy across the harbour. You think we got it bad here? You’re gonna love Gotham City.”

•

There was someone inside Wayne Manor.

It had only been by chance that he’d noticed—a quick glance in the direction of the decrepit building was all he ever gave it when he was behind the wheel, and tonight a quick glance was all he’d needed to notice that a single window in the building’s crumbling facade was illuminated from within; it created the appearance of a single glowing eye against the dark and sinister backdrop of the forest, and it followed him like one as he took a hard left, hit the brakes, and skidded to a sandy stop in the mouth of the driveway leading up to the mansion. 

Bruce put it in reverse and slowly backed onto the road, switching his focus between the window and the rear view mirror. There should have been no electricity in that building. There was nothing inside that could possibly shine so brightly.

...Unless.

He parked his car behind the treeline and made his way slowly up the road, then cut through the overgrown lawn to approach the abandoned estate from the side. It was difficult to see anything out here, especially during the night. No streetlights guided the way, and the glow from the city was far-off, insufficient to light the way. Even the moon had hidden itself behind a convenient bit of cloud cover, but it didn’t make a difference.

Bruce was used to the night. And he was no stranger to this property.

The light shifted, as if someone had taken a spotlight and turned it this way and that. Squatters, possibly, looking for a place to hide from the GCPD, or somewhere to get high.

Or.

Bruce pushed the thought out of his mind. He could easily find the room, but he would have to approach cautiously. Although a single grand window opened to the front, he recalled that on the far side of the manor, the side that he had not yet passed, two windows opened to the room.

If a single eye had watched him from the front lawn, two almost certainly watch him from that side.

He stole around the side of the manor like a shadow, moving swiftly and silently to the back of the manor to find the rear entrance. It had been some time since he’d last been here; the great double doors were battered and half-hanging from their hinges, leaving a yawning mouth that led to a pitch-black interior. The light did not reach this far, but Bruce knew where he would find it; that room had once been an impressive living room, a beautiful entertaining space with an elegant fireplace, an arched ceiling, and clawed-foot settees and sofas for guests.

Now it collected dust, dead leaves, and the bones of long-dead creatures that had tried and failed to make it their home, too.

Bruce moved more cautiously once inside the ruins of Wayne Manor. He kept his respiration slow and measured, listening between inhale and exhale for the sound of voices, footsteps, the scrape of equipment across a floor… but so far there was nothing. No sign of life. The house was silent and still and dark, so terribly dark, the helpless and foreboding dark of a house abandoned.

Except for the living room.

As he entered the hallway that would lead him to his destination, Bruce could now see the glow that emanated from within. He crept closer and slid a hand into the inside of his jacket pocket, closing it around the familiar metal of a batarang that had warmed against his chest, and froze in place just outside the open doors. The light shifted as though sensing him; it became temporarily brighter and then faded, as if its source had been turned away once again. As if the house had turned its gaze inward and discovered him, an intruder, and was deciding what to do with him.

Bruce withdrew the batarang silently, and, holding it so that the broad side glinted in the light, slowly began to slide one sharp-tipped wing into the path of the light. It gleamed like a mirror, granting Bruce a somewhat distorted reflection of the room beyond, and at the same time the light swiveled in his direction once more, tinting the aged and decrepit hallway the colour of blood. Bruce could see nothing beyond the light, and he heard nothing within. And he was a master of listening to silence. No equipment was being dragged about, no muffled footsteps carried the house’s latest inhabitant into the darkest corners to hide, no voices whispered to remain out of sight.

The house simply waited. It waited and Bruce waited, as though each had been suspended in time, frozen between breaths under the red spotlight glare of some great and terrible entity.

He’d waited long enough. 

He turned the corner, and the light was gone.

He clutched the batarang by one steel-tipped wing and prepared to strike his mark, and instead found himself scanning the dark for the culprit, temporarily blinded by the utter loss of light within. It would not have been the first time someone had tried to take up residence in the ruins of Wayne Manor, and would not have been the first time anyone had tried to hide from him; teens had partied here, leaving empty red cups and glass bottles and the stink of beer and marijuana, but it was rare for anyone to spend more than a few hours within its walls, with the house being so far from the city and so close to the lake where Bruce resided. No squatters would stay more than a night or two. Vandals never returned to mark the walls a second time.

Yes, anything that attempted to dwell here inevitably succumbed to it. What ‘it’ was, Bruce had never attempted to determine; he simply understood that the only permanent residents of Wayne Manor were memories, and had decided long ago that it was best to leave it that way.

His eyes adjusted quickly again to the dark. He was certain in his assessment, yet he swept the room cautiously with his eyes, seeking a flash of movement, an errant shadow, or something new entirely, but it seemed that nothing was out of place. Dust and rubble still covered the antique floor of the room; a sofa with its torn and stained fabric sat empty in the corner; and the discoloured rectangle on the wall over the mantle where a portrait of the Wayne family had once hung still loomed, dark and foreboding, at the head of the room.

Bruce stepped inward. Moonlight, now visible, filtered through the broken and stained windows, painting the barren floor and walls with a peaceful light. The room was precisely as he’d remembered it, yet it brought him no comfort; it felt as if something lingered in the air, as if the long pause he’d taken before stepping in had not yet been broken by the house.

He lifted his head. He closed his eyes. He inhaled.

Then he turned and sent his batarang careening expertly toward the figure who had followed Bruce across the room.

And somehow, he missed.

No, that wasn’t right. It hit its target precisely—Bruce rarely missed such a mark, especially from this distance, and it was certainly hard to miss a figure as broad-shouldered as the one that stood before him now. It had struck its target and simply kept going, hitting the far wall and clattering to the ground in a manner that would alert anyone still in the house to its presence. But as surprised as Bruce was that the figure still remained upright after taking the flat side of a batarang to the head, he was more surprised still by the face that emerged from the shadows as the figure stepped toward him.

It was Superman. Unmistakably, impossibly, undeniably Superman.

Every sense Bruce had told him that something was not right. The ringing in his ears from the metallic clang of the baratang striking the wall and floor had faded to a dull hum that seemed to drown out all else. It even rendered the first slow step Superman—Clark Kent, in his iconic Kryptonian suit and cape—completely soundless.

“Clark,” Bruce said.

The hair on his arms stood on end. An outdated response, of course. The sight of Clark no longer frightened him, even against the skeleton of the house Bruce had left behind. It had been too long since the world had seen that face, that suit; the blue material gleamed black in the moonlight, and Bruce fought not to tremble.

“You’re dead,” he said.

Clark, to his surprise, smiled.

“I love you,” he replied softly, then looked away. Bruce, helpless and uncertain, followed his gaze to the half-rotted bookshelves, the singed and blackened fireplace, the long shapes cast by the moon on the walls. Clark took another step forward, and this time his boot crunched softly on the debris on the floor. He looked down at it as if noticing for the first time the ground that he was treading, and then turned away.

“I don’t understand,” Bruce whispered. He took a step forward, then another, and reached out as Clark paused mid-step, expecting his fingers to simply pass through Clark’s cape and shoulder. 

Only he made contact.

He made contact and, compelled by a sense of desperation that he did not yet understand, sought more contact, and more, and more. He touched Clark’s shoulder, felt the tessellated material of the alien skinsuit beneath his fingers, felt the fabric of his cape go taut in his grasp as he turned Clark back to face him.

“You can’t go,” he breathed. “You can’t keep doing this. I can’t...”

His hand slipped from Clark’s shoulder and fell to his side. Clark watched it fall, and without a word stepped forward and embraced him.

“This is my world,” he said softly.

There was something somber in his voice; it was no louder than a murmur against Bruce’s ear, for he was close enough now to rest his chin on Bruce’s shoulder. _How poignant,_ Bruce thought. This was Superman’s world, and his world, too. Dreams and whispered words. Shadows and silence scattered among the stone. A monument to the dead.

Bruce laughed softly, helplessly. Clark was close enough to rest his chin on Bruce’s shoulder, and after a moment’s pause he did. Bruce gripped at the cape beneath his fingers, closed his eyes, and nodded. “Yeah, it is. I always knew there was… I hoped— _we_ ,” he said, unable to stop himself, “hoped you had something. Some way back. Some last card up your sleeve.”

“You,” Clark murmured.

It was so intimate. It felt like an accusation and a question both. Bruce wasn’t sure which, until he blinked his eyes open and saw, out of the corner of his eye and just over his shoulder, a gentle red glow beginning to illuminate the wall and the grimy, shattered remnants of window panes.

He jerked back as though burned. Clark made no attempt to restrain him, and he stumbled backward, throwing up an instinctive hand and squeezing his eyes shut against the molten heat that had begun to illuminate Clark’s skull from the inside. It easily overpowered the darkness that permeated the manor, and Bruce’s eyes burned and watered from the intensity. It was like looking into the sun: a light so intense that he was certain it would incinerate him if he remained in the room for any longer.

Then it was gone.

It took several seconds for his eyes to adjust after the searing brightness faded, but the room had not grown dark. In fact, that was the only thing about it that had not changed. The walls, no longer the spray painted, peeling, dust-and-cobweb-covered ruins of Wayne Manor, were covered in withered tendrils that crept downward like dehydrated veins, and the neat corners of the house’s familiar architecture had collapsed in and taken on a rounded shape. The room, still filled with a gentle red glow—and Christ, was he starting to resent that colour—looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. What remained of the floor formed a precarious, broken bridge that descended into a pool of dark sludge… a pool that Bruce remembered from photographs, pieces of evidence that now belonged to the Metropolis PD, the FBI, ARGUS, and anyone else who had taken an interest in the pool hidden within the depths of the crashed Kryptonian ship that now sat in the heart of Metropolis.

All of that, Bruce recognized in an instant; in the next, he became acutely aware of the gauntlets on his hands, the edge of the cowl against his cheek, the compression of the Batsuit that he did not recall donning. Alarm set in. When had he changed? When had he arrived? How long had it been since—since the Manor, since Clark? Had he dreamt it?

Was he dreaming now?

He spun again, half-expecting to break the illusion and see that he had never left the manor, but behind him was nothing more than an open door, unmistakably alien in its design. Unmistakably Kryptonian. He needed no photographs to know that.

“Alfred? Can you hear me?”

No response. His communication systems were off. Not simply off, but offline entirely. Something in the ship appeared to be interfering with the suit’s tech.

Bruce turned again, looked at the alien pool, and grimaced. He knew the atrocities that had been committed here. He knew what the things that emerged from this pool were capable of.

And he knew, as something dark moved beneath the surface, that he was not alone.

The shadow stopped moving. It seemed to grow more distinct, becoming the outline of a body rising to the surface with chilling slowness. The hair on his arms stood once more, pricking uncomfortably beneath his suit as he watched it rise and then stop. It had not breached the surface, and although its features were largely obscured alien fluid’s unnatural properties, he felt a familiar discomfort. The discomfort of being watched by someone or something whose eyes he could not see.

Still, there was nothing behind him.

“Utterly magnificent,” said a voice from below. Bruce turned back with predatory sharpness, and it took mere seconds to recognize the face of General Zod, the Kryptonian who had led the manhunt for Superman and destroyed a significant portion of Metropolis (along with a small Kansas town that Bruce had, thus far, visited once and once only) in his quest to find him.

But it couldn’t have been him. Bruce had watched him die—the entire world had, too, not once but twice, each time by Clark’s hand. Once, before a small, frightened family and then again amidst the rubble in Gotham City, when he’d taken on a form mutated and corrupted by blood. Human blood. Tainted blood. A titan who had risen from the same pool he now gazed upon.

General Zod stood at the edge of the liquid with his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a skinsuit quite similar to Clark’s, muted and dark in colour, and seemed to be, like Bruce, fixated on the shadow beneath the surface. “Have you ever seen such beauty in all your life? No, of course you haven’t.”

He turned his head. All of the smartphone and surveillance footage that had caught Zod while he was alive—and the photos of his corpse taken by the government and by Lex Luthor after his death—could not possibly have prepared Bruce for direct eye contact with him. It was like looking into liquid nitrogen. His eyes flashed and suddenly Bruce’s attention was drawn behind him, and he realized that General Zod was no longer alone in the room with him; from the strange liquid extended dozens, possibly hundreds of vine-like stalks, each dotted with dozens of balls of light. They swayed gently in the still air like seaweed in an invisible current.

Bruce rested a hand on his belt, and Zod lifted his chin and leered. _We both know it won’t work_ , his expression seemed to say. _You tried that already, remember_?

“You’re not here,” Bruce said. His voice came out more harshly than intended, forced into a guttural, mechanical warble by the cowl. “This isn’t real. You’re dead.”

“Oh,” said General Zod, “you don’t really believe that, do you?”

He felt the room crackling with the same electrical energy, and wondered whether it was simply something that all Kryptonians emanated; the balls of light, glowing like lightbulbs upon the stalks, grew brighter, casting Zod’s features into horrifyingly sharp relief until his eyes, too, began to glow, filling the interior of the chamber with the scent of ozone, of burning.

And yet Bruce was unafraid. He had been here before. He’d stared down those very eyes, in General Zod and in Superman both, and he knew even as he raised a hand, closing his eyes to the light that poured through the cracks between his fingers like a sieve, that he would simply wake up in his own bed, drenched in sweat, his heart racing from a nightmare that would never come to pass.

The smell of burning surrounded him. He smelled fire, and smoke, and the sickly scent of burnt flesh. And for a moment, he wondered whether he truly was burning.

And when he opened his eyes again, it was to a sound he hadn’t expected. A pop, and the delicate tinkle of glass.

Around the base of the Serge Mouille lay the broken remnants of a single light bulb.

•

“You don’t have to do this!” Clark yelled. Desperation and fear threatened to overwhelm him, and strengthened him at the same time. He was the only thing holding Zod back from murdering innocents, exterminating thousands, millions. Zod was right; he had no formal training, no tactical skill. Nothing beyond his desire to bring Zod’s massacre to an end.

Truthfully, he was afraid. He was afraid for the family cowering before him, the children whose clothing already carried the sour, singed smell of ozone and burnt fabric. He was afraid for himself. This was a choice he had never wanted to make. 

“Stop!”

“Never,” Zod hissed.

The sound of the molten heat blazing from his face was a deafening roar. The sound elicited a sense of dread in Clark that he had not felt for many years; it almost made him nauseous, the effect was so powerful. The very air felt as if it had been set ablaze, crackling with a desperate, frantic energy. 

Clark saw the family before him, cowering, cornered.

And he saw someone else. _Something_ else, standing untouched within the inferno of Zod’s fury.

He gripped. He twisted. The fire and the figure within disappeared.

What happened next, Clark could never forget. A cry welled up within him, the expulsion of a primal emotion the likes of which he had never felt before; rage, a deep and unnatural hatred for all that Zod had done, all that Zod had forced him to do... but also anguish and helplessness. There were no words that could express that his heart felt that it had been rent. There was no way to congratulate him on a victory that had required so much loss.

The sound grated in his throat and echoed within the stone walls and stairwells of the station until it felt as if dozens of versions of himself were screaming back at him.

None were, of course. Not even the figure that stood at the far end of the station where wisps of smoke curled out of the blackened and cracked stone, whose mouth opened wide to reveal an ember-glow deep within.

•

“Do you remember the Burning Man?”

Martha, who had just finished wiping the last of the dishwater off with a tea towel, stood in the doorway of the kitchen, rested her hands on her hips, and searched the catalogue of her memory.

“The Burning Man, huh?” She squinted in thought at Clark, who lay curled on the couch in front of the television. It had been a tough day at school for him. There were always bullies, always fights that he could only walk away from and would refuse to talk about later. Always a shaking rage and a feeling of utter powerlessness. And there was always his mother, who understood best the healing powers of a good bowl of ice cream and television past bedtime. “You mean like that hippie festival that happens in the desert?”

“No,” Clark said, then heaved the great sigh of an exasperated teenager. He was smart to keep under his breath the few words he knew would get him in trouble, if he ever said them. Some days he could dig deep inside himself and find that frustration. Now, he simply seemed tired. “Never mind. Forget about it.”

“Well, if that’s what you want,” Martha said, but didn’t move from the doorway, since that was what Clark rarely ever wanted in the end. She stood there for several minutes, blocking the light from the kitchen while Clark continued to stare at the television. “Or we can talk about it, if you’d like. You said it was the Burning Man?”

“It’s nothing,” Clark said sullenly. “Seriously.”

“No, no, you called it something. The Burning Man? You know, that does ring a bell. Huh. Been a long time since I heard about that one.” She paused, allowing a moment for Clark to elaborate, but his adolescent stubbornness seemed to have won out. Hard to get a peep out of him when he got like this. Maybe best to wait. “Yeah, I remember the Burning Man. You used to have these nightmares about him, you know, awful ones… sometimes right in the middle of the day.”

“Mhmm.”

Martha, unwilling to allow Clark to believe that all problems could be solved by stoic silence, sat on the sofa and cocked her head. She wished sometimes that his powers had originated from her instead—that his ability to look through one’s mind in the most literal sense had been a genetic trait, and that the ability to see into Clark’s head and flip through his thoughts like the phone book was one that came naturally to all mothers. It would have been useful. “Been a few years since you saw him. You’re not having those dreams again, are you?”

Clark shook his head. It was well past his bedtime, and Clark was quite good at conking out when he had to, but he simply continued to stare in silence at the television. Something in the back of Martha’s mind suggested that he had stopped watching it long ago. It was as if he could see something beyond the moving pixels and circuitry

“Well, if you want to talk about it, we can,” she said. “I’ve had some weird dreams too, you know. Some that have woken me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, just like that. And sometimes they stick with you. All day, even. But you know that’s all they are. Just dreams.”

Clark nodded. “Yeah. Just stupid dreams. Kid stuff.” 

Ah, that was it. Martha pressed her lips together, then pushed herself up, stepped between Clark and the t.v., and pressed a kiss to his forehead. He didn’t object. Must’ve needed it.

“Stay up as late as you need,” she said. “Just make sure to turn out the light when you go to bed.”

She returned the tea towel to the kitchen and was in the process of putting the plates in their proper place whe Clark said: “I dreamt he killed dad.”

Martha stopped. A strange sensation washed over her, one that she would in the future experience again—at two different funerals, nearly twenty years apart—and recognize as sorrow, and grief, and despair. The sort that would tear a person in two if they let it.

“He had this… weird… I dunno, spear thing. It was long and it came out of his arm, like a… like some kind of sword. And he stabbed him with it. I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t move, I just… I tried to yell, and dad just…”

Clark’s voice wavered, and that was the end of the story. 

Martha had questions, of course, the same sort of questions about dreams that any person would ask to try to make sense of such a nightmare— _did it scare you? did it seem like the Burning Man was angry at your father? is there anything I can do to help?_ —but she said nothing, and let the story sit between them like a sinking weight.

She knew what Jonathan would say in response to such a dream: it was likely some sort of subconscious guilt over a recent argument, and nothing more. Dreams drew from reality and amplified emotion, and performed all sorts of uncomfortable displays in the theatre of the mind. Clark had always come with an added layer of stress and uncertainty, and if he aged as normal humans did—and he certainly seemed to be doing so, though he was tougher, stronger, growing taller still every day—puberty would come on swift wings and make his fears and doubts and all the rest a hundred times worse.

Still, some small part of her couldn’t help but wonder if this was all because of Clark’s mysterious origins. It was difficult enough to navigate the emotions of a normal teenager, to console them after a nightmare, to reassure them that dreams passed and life went on. It was harder to reassure someone who often felt as though his very existence was nightmarish and dream-like.

She went back into the living room. She sat on the sofa, and held out her arm, and Clark moved wordlessly closer, settling against her side the way he often had when he was a child. She ran her fingers through his hair, slow and soothing, and began to hum; something, anything, just a song to fill the noise. Clark’s favourite song. A television theme song. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since Clark had experienced a nightmare like that, but she knew that she would stay with him for as long as it took for him to feel safe.

She’d stay as long as he needed.

_iv. and louder I’ll scream back to you_

The mutated Kryptonian behemoth had to be stopped. There was no choice sitting in front of Clark this time, no moral dilemma to work through, no time for _what if_ s. There was something Kryptonian destroying the city of Metropolis again, and it was growing stronger. Perhaps Clark could have reasoned with Zod, even a little. But the thing that flew through the city now, emitting powerful electrical pulses that flattened anything nearby ( _like the World Engine_ , his mind supplied,) was not slowing down, and did not appear capable of reason.

So there was no choice. Not really.

Somewhere deep inside, Clark had already come to that realization. He knew that the nausea churning his stomach and the faint tremor in his arms and the unshakeable feeling of helplessness was likely as much a response to that knowledge as it was a reaction to the kryptonite spear. It still made him want to vomit. The memory of Zod, the knowledge of the terrible thing that Lex Luthor had done, the uncomfortable sense of déjà vu that he had experienced while wrapping himself around the creature’s head before briefly losing consciousness.

And more uncomfortable still was that it was not the creature he feared the most. Although his field of vision currently consisted of only two warriors—one a killer of otherworldly creatures, one an otherworldly creature who refused to be killed—he could see, far across the incinerated battlefield, standing among the flames and rubble, a shadow with flaming eyes. The Burning Man watched from afar, flickering in the waves of heat that rolled from the scorched earth, intangible, incorporeal, and inaudible.

From its hand extended something long, pointed, and undoubtedly lethal.

Clark blinked water out of his eyes. The kryptonite was still too close. Everything hurt. It felt like his body wished to give out on him. It would be a relief to collapse in the dirt and take a very long nap, oblivious to the destruction and death that surrounded him.

He saw the Burning Man open his mouth; what he heard was the high-pitched whine of heat emanating from the Kryptonian monster, a roar, a distant scream.

The kryptonite glowed a sickly green among the rubble. Green the colour of poison and malaise. Of new grass poking through the earth of a grave plot.

Of death.

“I love you,” he told Lois. It was a struggle to remove his gaze from the ghostly figure, whose mouth moved seemingly in a mockery of his own. He wanted to say more than that. He felt as if he had, in those words alone. _I love you, but I’ve been hiding from this for too long. I love you, and I must confront him. I love you, and if I fail, we’re all doomed._

He’d already lost sight of Batman. Bruce, who had joined the fight without a moment’s hesitation, whose Kryptonian weapon would now be used for its intended purpose, stood no chance against the thing in the field. He was wise to hide. It was a shame Clark didn’t have the time to thank him for his help.

A fresh wave of nausea swept over him, and he swallowed hard and forced himself to look at the Burning Man once more.

“This is my world,” he said. Realization dawned on Lois’s face as he spoke, but his eyes were fixed on the battle raging before him; the warrior, the woman unknown to both himself and Bruce, had temporarily restrained the creature. Bruce, now visible through the smoke, was readying another grenade, his heart jackhammering beneath his armour, a minor tremor in his hands. 

They were prepared to fight to the end, each of them. Prepared to confront the same threat, prepared to throw themselves again and again in front of humanity to protect what was theirs. Bruce had wanted a Kryptonian to kill; the warrior, too, had dealt with aliens; and the figure that took the shape of a man with glowing, evil eyes—the one that had haunted Clark’s dreams, had haunted his waking world, that now before his eyes took the form of a Kryptonian monstrosity equipped with a long, jagged spike in place of a hand—had only a single weakness.

Clark said something else, then, something that was not goodbye, something that he knew he would not regret. And then he flew. He picked up the spear, and held it before himself like a sword, and hurtled with all his might toward the thing that threatened all that he cared for.

What happened next, Clark would never remember in its entirety. 

He would recall the pain in his chest as an agonizing inferno. He would recall screaming, filled with rage and sorrow and determination, and pain, so much pain. He would recall the monster‘s dying scream blending with his own, and the way that it gazed at him with sightless red eyes full of flame and fury, and he would recall light, and a powerful expulsion of unnatural electrical energy, and

the wide-eyed, frightened face of a boy of ten, pointing a shaking finger to the dark corner of his bedroom, and

the hunched and trembling shoulders of a young man racked with sobs, turned away from a funeral in a small cemetery on a hill among fields of vibrant green, and

a figure collapsing upon the floor with smoking eyes, while a man knelt upon the ground and howled in despair, wearing a cape that spilled around him like blood, and

the same cemetery in a different time, with the fields leeched of their colour and a coffin lowered, and around it Martha and Lois and Bruce and the woman, and

an armoured man standing before another, with a blade flashing red with blood and an expression of sorrowful disbelief and a woman crying out, and

himself, impossibly, still gripping the kryptonite spear, with his chest and back cracked apart and his mouth open wide in a scream that could not be heard over the crackling conflagration of red and orange and green.

Clark gripped the spear in his hand and, gazing across the smoldering, abandoned ruins of northeastern Gotham, saw himself, young and terrified and full of grief and guilt and anger and sadness. The spear glittered green in his hand, and he opened his mouth to speak, and nothing but flame poured out.

The Burning Man. The ghost.

And he and the Burning Man screamed and burned as one.

•

When the coffin opened, Bruce half-expected to find it empty.

Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d known that Clark would be inside it all along, had known that the visions of Clark he had experienced were little more than spectres, phantasms, echoes; something created by the grieving mind, something that was both ghost and memory, utterly incorporeal yet undoubtedly alive. He knew what hauntings could look like, how regret and fear could take shape, how the unconscious mind could conjure scent and sound and all sorts of sensation… and he knew the weight of Clark’s corpse, flesh and blood as true as his own, a body that would lay suspended in time for all of eternity in a small cemetery with nothing but a name to mark its existence.

Yes, he’d expected the corpse, but something else gave Bruce pause as the coffin lid was lifted, sending errant bits of sod and soil scattering across the floor: a photograph, one of a single man, tucked protectively beneath a hand that would never know what it held.

The obituary photo for Clark Kent had shown a man in a plaid shirt and glasses who looked at the camera as if he were seeing through it; the man in the photo tucked against Clark’s chest wore glasses around his neck and a chequered shirt of his own, yet it was not a professional portrait. It was a portrait of a man holding a fish, displaying proudly his great catch. A portrait of a father, Bruce realized.

And the face. Familiar in a way that Bruce had not been able to place until now—until the memory of a simple gravestone belonging to a Beloved Husband and Father came to mind. Until it was swallowed up by the gelatinous sludge at the bottom of the tank as Clark’s body was removed from the pine and placed gently into the strange, oily surface, and became part of the same dark, amorphous shape that was now being slowly coaxed into the semi-opaque depths of the pool.

It made Bruce uneasy. Clark’s features seemed to dissolve as his body sank deeper, until he was little more than—

“A shadow,” Clark’s voice supplied in Bruce’s mind.

Bruce hummed. The body disappeared into the depths of the pool, and it was only when Bruce looked up that he noticed one by one, each of the people standing inside the ruins of the Kryptonian chamber—Arthur Curry, Barry Allen, Diana Prince, Victor Stone—had all turned to look at him.

No, beyond him. As if seeing through him.

As if seeing…

“Has this... happened before? I can’t remember.” Clark, Superman, the Kryptonian who had recently been removed from his grave, crossed his arms over the red-and-gold sigil on his chest, and Bruce thought: _yes, yes, I have seen you before. I have seen you standing next to me while you were still in the ground. I have seen you so many times._

“Wait,” said Arthur, shooting a suspicious glance at the dark shape of Clark beneath the liquid, visibly struggling to process the sight of Clark in two separate places, wearing two separate outfits. “Isn’t he...?”

“Holy shit,” Barry whispered. “That’s a ghost. Guys, that’s a fucking ghost.”

Diana took a step closer. “A hologram?”

“No,” said Victor, who perhaps better than any of them knew the difference between something living and something not. “I mean… this isn’t something the ship did.”

“No, I’m pretty sure he’s a ghost.”

No one could contest him. They all knew what Clark was, and they all knew what he was not.

He _was_ in the pool. He _was_ standing among them. He was dead, without a doubt, and yet he was standing there before them as if he had been there all along.

And he was frowning.

“I… don’t know what you mean,” he said, looking from Bruce to Diana. “Why are you here? What exactly is this?”

“You’re dead,” Bruce said.

“No. I… I would know if that were true,” Clark said, sounding uncertain. “Wouldn’t I know if I’d died?”

“That’s literally your coffin,” Barry said, pointing at Clark’s literal coffin.

“I mean, I wasn’t there, but these guys saw what happened,” Arthur said, pointing his trident first at Diana, then at Bruce. “I mean, maybe you weren’t dead, but we just pulled you outta the ground.”

Clark opened his mouth, then closed it and looked at Bruce, as though hoping to get some clarification.

Bruce couldn’t speak. He had seen Clark’s body disappear into the tank. He had watched them cover his coffin with dirt. He had used his own hands to lower Clark, a corpse with open, unseeing eyes, so that Lois could hold him and grieve.

The crumbling foundation of Bruce’s defenses shuddered once more. 

“You were dead,” he said, and thought: _please, tell me you weren’t._

Clark looked down at his own hands. He examined his suit, the crest on the front that was whole and untouched, then stepped soundlessly down the walkway toward the others. “I know you,” he said, pausing in front of Diana. “Don’t I? You and Bruce, both of you were there when…”

He lapsed into silence. Bruce’s heart ached for him. Whether he had truly died or not, he now seemed lost; whether he was a hologram, or a ghost, or a living, breathing person, he had been changed irrevocably, and now stood in a world that had simply moved on without him.

“You remember what happened?” Diana asked.

“No… yes. I remember… this place. Lex Luthor.” Clark glanced around, taking in the shriveled and limp remnants of the strange amniotic stalks that had once nourished young Kryptonians, then lifted a hand to his chest, frowning down into the unsettling fluid at the bottom of the tank. “The monster. That thing Luthor made in here. We stopped it, didn’t we? It took all of us together… your rope, your gas. The spear.”

Beneath the amber surface of the Kryptonian fluid, the shadow of Clark’s body was being drawn deeper and out of sight by dark, aquiline shapes. He turned away and, seeming to notice Arthur for the first time, gave a small, sad smile. “You… and you,” he said, nodding at Victor, then Barry, “and you. I’ve seen all of you before, but where… how long has it been?”

Barry shook his head and pressed his fingers to his temple as though to stave off a headache. “Wait, wait, okay. I’m sorry to interrupt, uh, Superman, but this is really—and I’m sorry if I’m hung up on this, but... aren’t you supposed to be dead? Like, as we speak, your body is literally in that—that fluid, so are you…?”

Clark was quiet for a very long time.

“Honestly,” he said at last, “I can’t remember, but I think I was. Or… maybe still am. But why would you bring my body here?”

“We planned to reactivate your cells,” Bruce said. He felt it nearly unbearable to see Clark turn and look at him, and was not yet willing to admit that perhaps he had seen Clark after his death—not simply in his own imagination, but as a genuine spectre, a true separation of body and spirit. “The plan was to bring you back. To use the ship and the mother box to jump start your body, to give you a chance to come back and show the world that you were… still here.”

“But I wasn’t, not really,” Clark said, turning away from the mysterious subaqueous workings of the Kryptonian ship. He began to move back up the walkway, one unnaturally quiet step at a time, pausing first to gaze at Diana, then Bruce. “And it’s not your fault, what happened out there. I need you to know that. Neither of you could have done any better without risking your own lives. You saw it, too.”

“Hold on, slow down a second. What do you mean, you weren’t?” Arthur asked, stepping up onto the platform where the rest of the uncertain group stood. “You weren’t what? Weren’t still here? Weren’t dead?”

“But that’s crazy. You realize this all sounds crazy, right?” Barry looked and felt as though he were on the verge of experiencing a migraine, or an epiphany, or both. “So what you’re saying is… you weren’t dead, but you weren’t here. And that means… what? Your body isn’t—I mean, sorry, bear with me. You _died_ ,” he said, gesturing at Clark’s chest, “but you’re not _dead_. You’re standing right here, but you’re also there. In the tank we were gonna use to bring you back to life.”

“He’s not standing there,” Victor said quietly.

Barry, who was far more familiar with the concept of moving at incomprehensible speeds than he was the concept of death and undeath, shook his head. “I don’t get it. I thought you said Kryptonians can’t die?”

“They can’t.” Bruce reached up and pulled off his cowl. He remembered now the slow, agonizing pain that came with allowing himself to hope. He took a step toward Clark, then another, and shook his head. “Kryptonian cells, they don’t die. All we have to do is use the mother box. All Barry has to do is activate it with you in the pool, and you’ll… you’ll be here. You’ll be back.”

It had been a long time since Bruce had felt this way. It felt as though something had pierced his chest, left his lungs to collapse, left him clawing and gasping for air. He was aware that they were all looking at him: Diana, Barry, Victor, Arthur, Clark, watching his plan and resolve give way under the weight of Clark’s very presence.

Bruce looked toward the shadow of Clark in the pool, and could not see it in the murky depths. He dropped the cowl and took a step closer.

“Bruce,” Diana said softly.

“No,” he said as he turned toward the edge. “No, we can—I can do this. I can bring you back, we just need—”

A hand closed around his shoulder, and slowly he turned and saw Clark, gazing at him with the same somber expression that Bruce had seen so many times in his dreams.

Or had simply seen. So many times.

He allowed himself to be pulled away from the pool, away from the body and the photograph and the coffin that lay empty and forgotten, and allowed Clark to pull him closer until he sank into his arms. 

He squeezed tightly, selfishly, as though expecting that Clark would suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke. And Clark squeezed back.

•

“Is it possible for me to die?”

The artificial presence of Jor-El, the first and only Kryptonian Clark had ever met in his life, studied him with great care; his expression, at first gently amused by Clark’s many questions—supportive of his inquisitive nature, he hoped—fell, and became one of great sorrow.

“It’s possible for anyone to die, Kal. Rather, it is impossible to live forever.” He tilted his head in the direction of a nearby wall, and a passage opened swiftly and soundlessly. Jor-El turned and stepped through it. Clark followed.

“You say that, but you’re still here on the ship. And all of those”—he struggled with the thought of calling them people; perhaps babies, or fetuses, or embryos, or undeveloped entities bursting with genetic potential that had been sustained for thousands of years on nutritional stalks, waiting to be harvested by eerie aquatic robots—“ _things_ in the genesis chamber, they’ve been alive since this ship arrived here, haven’t they? What is that, if not immortality?”

“Some have,” Jor-El agreed patiently, “though they, too, can be susceptible to illness and malady, even in such a state. When Kryptonians are born, they are created artificially, grown and nourished and nurtured in an environment designed for the simple task of keeping them alive until they can be given to their families. If some are lost, the blueprint is simply accessed and a new child built from it again… that is, until now.”

“So the ones in the chamber can die?”

“Of course they can,” Jor-El said softly. “Lara and I understood the risk that we took in creating you, Kal. We accepted the possibility that you might not survive your journey alone, and we sent you regardless. Not because of statistics or scientific hypotheses, but because we had nothing to lose by allowing you to be taken from us by Zod and his insurgents… and everything to gain by sending you somewhere that might allow you to live.”

They wound through unfamiliar halls and passageways of the ship as Jor-El spoke, and emerged in a room that Clark quickly recognized from the first time he’d stepped into the craft; it was a room filled with ovular pods, most still sealed, their contents obscured by thick layers of dust. Clark knew what lay within—he still felt the dust on his fingers, still remembered the shriveled face within—and a sense of unease swept gently over him, like an ocean wave beneath the moon.

“You said the atmosphere made me stronger. Why did all of these people die here?”

Jor-El trailed his fingers across the surface of one pod. The dust atop the glass remained undisturbed, and Jor-El‘s voice dropped and became melancholic. “The atmosphere of this planet and the sun of this solar system have strengthened you, my son, but you have been here for many years. These people never had a chance to adapt to this world, to its gravity, its air, its radiation. And like all living things without sustenance or resources, they succumbed to the fate that inevitably claims us all. If they were lucky, they simply passed in their sleep, free from pain or suffering.” He looked up. “To answer your question: no Kryptonian can live forever, Kal. Even I died long ago, despite what you see and hear before you now.”

“But you’re still here,” Clark insisted. “You can talk to me, you can—you can tell stories and show me things.”

“And I am still dead,” Jor-El said with a soft smile. “You’re right about my presence, but I must correct you. Until now, I lived only as data within the key you wore around your neck. Data that has already been outdated, as my knowledge and memories are limited to the events prior to my death. I could only be accessed by a Kryptonian vessel, and there was no guarantee that I would be. Had you never used the key, I may not have had my intelligence uploaded for all of eternity. The key may have been lost, or the data erased, and I simply would have… and could, were my presence to be forcibly removed… cease to exist. I suppose,” he added, turning to Clark as he stepped backward to—and through—one of the occupied pods, “in a manner of speaking, in bringing me here you have saved me from certain death. I exist because you have granted me the freedom to do so. Would you consider such a condition one of immortality?”

Clark shook his head and fought a shiver. The air was not cool inside the ship, despite being buried beneath the immeasurable weight of thousands of years’ worth of ice and snow, but there was something unpleasant about being within a space so intimate and closed-off, with nothing but skeletons all around. It felt like he had been led into a mausoleum. Even Jor-El’s explanation of Krypton’s demise hadn’t filled him with such a strange sense of—

dread. The feeling of being followed, of being watched. Of not being alone.

Clark spun around. There was no movement in the chamber. Even the ship’s ancient, inorganic attendants appeared to have floated off to perform some other important duty, leaving only himself and Jor-El alone with the corpses of long-dead Kryptonians.

The feeling passed as quickly as it had arrived.

The perceptive and empathetic data-based entity that was Jor-El seemed to take note of Clark’s discomfort. “Leave them to rest now. Come with me,” he said, indicating the hallway that led out of the room. “Tell me, my son. Is there some aspect of death that concerns you?”

“No,” Clark said quickly. “I mean, I don’t… I don’t really know. I guess I just thought that everything that made me invincible might mean that… this would be forever. That _I_ would be forever. That I would just keep living, and people would keep…”

He pressed his lips together and shook his head. To his surprise, Jor-El stopped walking, and when Clark stopped to look back, he saw that his father wore a small, sincere smile.

“What Lara would say if she could hear us,” he murmured, moving slowly toward Clark. “If only she knew that one day it would be a relief for you to hear that you, too, will pass away and find peace…”

He lifted a hand to Clark’s cheek, and Clark allowed his eyes to close as Jor-El made contact. It would have been wrong to say that he felt nothing; rather, what he felt he simply did not have words to describe. Not skin, but not air. Not warmth, but not cold. Jor-El simultaneously was and was not.

He ached fiercely and suddenly. He could not remember the feeling of Jonathan’s hand on his shoulder, the solid surface of his chest and arms in a hug.

He leaned into Jor-El and felt, for the first time since discovering the ship, a tear slide down his face.

“Although each of us will inevitably depart from this world, it does not mean that we are gone forever, Kal. The Kryptonians aboard this ship, though deceased in body, live on in long-dormant activity logs and data entries. I continue to exist as a sentient being, yet am confined to an ancient technology. And you, my son, will live on when you are gone. Perhaps in the memories of your loved ones, or in records of your good deeds, your misdeeds, your triumphs and mistakes. You will still exist long after you are gone. There is life and death within you already.  
Within your very cells, all the life and death of Krypton exists.”

Clark opened his eyes at last. Jor-El still smiled at him, emanating a fondness that data could not possibly convey.

“Mom said… when I was younger… I had trouble adjusting to the world. For a while, they thought I wasn’t going to make it.” Clark wiped at his face with his sleeve. He had so many questions, so many fears. Even with his father’s presence—and how strange to think of him that way—he wasn’t certain the answers to any of them would ever bring him peace. “Were you ready? When Krypton… ended?”

“Kal,” Jor-El said gently, “I wish that I knew. I know that it is never easy for anyone to face their death. Not for me, your mother, or anyone else. But when the time comes,” he added gently, “for you to pass and live on in stories and memory, I hope that it is as peaceful and natural as falling asleep.”

•

Crickets and other insects whined around Bruce, who stood in waist-high grass that rippled in gentle waves. And that _was_ all he could see—the rest of the landscape was a sea of stalks that glowed golden in the sun all the way to the horizon. He turned, and before him loomed a great metal gate.

A strange sensation tugged at him. It felt familiar, this place. The field, the few trees that granted some small respite from the sun, and the rows of graves beyond that denoted this place as a cemetery, a burial mound. He could not read the letters that loomed high overhead. And it didn’t seem to matter.

_Go_ , the grass seemed to say as he stepped through. Had he looked back along the only path that led to or from the cemetery, he would have noticed that the foliage had begun to wither and grow pale as he moved through it. Instead, he looked ahead, and approached the lone figure standing near a fresh grave.

“One hell of a tombstone,” said the man, wiping his brow with the back of a forearm streaked with dirt. He squinted in the sunlight, and Bruce saw that his other hand rested on the handle of a shovel. “Just a name on it. You don’t see that very often, one with just a name.”

He contemplated it for another moment, then chuckled and shook his head. “You know how old he was? Thirty-five. At thirty-five, I was young, in love… thought I’d seen all there was to see, growing up in the Midwest... well, guess it doesn’t matter now. Point is, he never really acted his age. He was wise beyond his years, wherever he got that from. Carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, and it still never bent him. Yeah, he still managed to do some good, but you could tell something was eating at him. Whatever it was, that… sadness, or sense of obligation, or whatever, it was growing in him. Burned him up from the inside out.”

The man scoffed, suddenly, as though he couldn’t believe his own speech. He turned to Bruce and eyed him as though he’d only just noticed he wasn’t alone. “And what about you? Don’t try to tell me you’re thirty-five, too. You look like hell for a thirty-five-year-old. No? What’s your story, then?”

Wind rustled the leaves and blew through the sea of dry stalks, creating a sound like a murmur among the grass. Unease gathered in Bruce like rain clouds looming on the horizon. The man in the cemetery did not look like a gravedigger, yet the earth of the plot was freshly turned. Piles of dirt made themselves known in his peripheral vision.

The pristine tombstone of Clark Joseph Kent watched the men silently, looking as if it had only just arrived.

“You’re probably wondering why you’re here, or what the hell I’m even talking about,” the man said. He gripped the shovel and lifted it from the earth, and the metal gleamed briefly in the setting sun, a flash of sickly green light. “Here, try this. There’s nothing to using it.” 

Bruce gripped the handle. It was sturdy, precisely the sort of shovel one would expect to find in a small cemetery like this one. The wooden shaft was old, cracked in spots, the paint long flaked off to reveal faded wood nearly the colour of bleached bone. The grip and blade, both metal, appeared to have rusted long ago.

“No offense, but you don’t look like you’ve ever used one of those in your life,” the man said. He no longer squinted against the sunlight; the sun had disappeared, lost to distant cloud cover that suggested rain. “Say, tell me something. Does it ever feel like… death just follows you wherever you go?”

_My whole life _, Bruce thought, but said nothing.__

__The man smiled knowingly at his silence._ _

__“Thought so. Some people are just drawn to it, it seems. Connected more strongly. It happens, you know. Sometimes it’s things like death. Sometimes sadness, sometimes grief… if you can feel it, it can find you. I always wondered, though... for some, I think it must be a where. Or maybe a who. Clark, well, I think he’s always been a when. When the story gets out, you know? When the time comes, when people realize what he is and what he’s done… yeah, my guess is he’s a when. But…” He paused, furrowing his brow at the shovel still clutched in Bruce’s hand. “Well, are you waiting for something?”_ _

__Bruce glanced down and realized with horror that it was not the shovel he was nodding his head at, but the coffin that lay at his feet. The wood, once a pristine white pine, was stained with dirt that still clung in moist clumps. More notably, the interior of the box seemed to glow gently from within. The light seeped out around the edges, creating neat lines of gold that felt like the first morning rays of sunlight._ _

__And suddenly, though Bruce recognized the name, he did not understand when or why Clark Kent, reporter from Metropolis, had been dug up. He did not understand when or why Clark Kent, reporter from Metropolis, had died at all. He’d only met Clark not long ago. Kansas. He’d said he was from Kansas._ _

__Bruce glanced around. _Kansas_ , he thought. _Wheat and corn. I thought it’d look more alive.__ _

__“I met him,” Bruce said. He gripped the shovel and used the blade to scrape aside the dirt that still covered the lid; it revealed a long, jagged crack that spider-webbed across the wooden surface. In the absence of the sun, the light seemed to shine all the brighter. “I’m dreaming, aren’t I? Or unconscious. Or dead.”_ _

__The man contemplated his question with a rather serious expression. He gazed out beyond the cemetery gates, focusing on something in the distance. The storm clouds, Bruce suspected. The sky had grown dark around them, and clouds threatened to spill rain. The leaves conversed with the grass, a whispered discussion that seemed to grow louder as the wind picked up. “Maybe. I’m sure at some point you’ll wish you were. You won’t be able to stop it, I can tell you that much.”_ _

__A sudden crack called Bruce’s attention to the coffin again, and he saw that the lid’s surface had splintered once more. Light spilled desperately from within, reaching upward like a hand seeking another. The wind grew stronger still, tugging at the fabric of Bruce’s jacket and causing it to whip across his body, and he managed to tear his gaze from the coffin to see that the surrounding sky had darkened to a deep and stormy grey. Branches creaked and protested, and one even snapped under the force of the wind; it flew between Bruce and the gravedigger, who gave no indication of having seen it, and was flung out over the field, which had grown turbulent in the gale. He simply stood with his hands on his hips, looked down at the open grave and its open coffin, and smiled._ _

__“What does that mean?” Bruce had to raise his voice to hear himself. “I won’t be able to stop what? Death?”_ _

__The wind howled. The grass hissed venomously and was pelted with loose soil that had been lifted from the pile nearby. The leaves on the trees danced, frenzied. The coffin cracked again, and a piece of the white pine was ripped away, flooding the graveyard with a light that was too bright to look into. Brighter, it seemed, than any light bulb or flood light. Brighter even than the sun._ _

__Bruce was forced to shield his face and squeeze his eyes shut. The howling of the wind became white noise—became a familiar electrical hum, the sound of a circuit overloading—and with a sound like glass shattering, the light in the coffin was extinguished, and everything in the cemetery along with it._ _

__And though Bruce woke suddenly, staring into the dark of the lake house, he was too late to notice the shadow—a man, broad in the shoulders, trailing a scarlet cape—as it slid across the floor and fled unseen into the night._ _

____

•

“I still don’t understand,” Bruce said quietly. “Why is it that Luthor was able to use the chamber to bring Zod back to life?”

“I don’t know that he did,” Clark admitted. “What he did to Zod’s body… if there had been anything left of him before that, it was taken from him.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“I know.”

They lapsed into silence. The ship was almost entirely silent around them; further down the hall, Bruce could hear Barry and Arthur failing to hold a quiet conversation. Victor had wandered off to explore the ship and to communicate with the alien AI that seemed to give the vessel its voice. Diana had, with Clark’s help, encouraged Bruce to leave the genesis chamber, squeezed his hand, and simply walked away.

“There’s something else, something I wanted to ask when you… if I had the chance.” Bruce held his cowl in his hands and brushed his thumb idly over the edge of a cheek, following a pattern that he still saw in his dreams. “Some of the things you’ve said… it all sounds so familiar. And I can’t place where or when I’ve heard these things, but…”

Clark hummed softly. They sat side-by-side on a structure that the Kryptonians must have considered a chair, but more closely resembled a turbulent bench. Clark, in particular, sat with his cape drawn to one side and slung across his lap. It was not what Bruce pictured when he thought of spectres and spirits. Then again, he’d seen plenty of ghosts take plenty of forms. This was not the strangest.

“It’s funny,” he said after a moment. “Out of everything I remember seeing, there are still some things that… don’t exactly make sense. Like holes in my memory. Things I know that I’ve said and done, people I’ve never met who feel familiar to me. Like the people you brought here. I don’t know them, yet I know that I’ve met them. They don’t feel like strangers to me. You don’t feel like a stranger to me.”

“We met each other,” Bruce said after a pause. “A while back. At Luthor’s event. I didn’t know who you were at the time, and I said some things that I…”

“I remember that,” Clark said. “I remember… we disagreed. But we don’t, now, do we? We have so much in common. So many things in our lives that we wished we could change… that regret spends a lifetime feeding on us. Maybe we do become the things that we fear in the end, but not always.” He laughed quietly, unexpectedly. “And I remember seeing you from outside the window. You were talking to Alfred about something. You thought you were being subtle, even through our conversation but I could hear every word he said. And everything you said, too.”

Bruce chuckled despite himself, and traced the path along the cowl’s cheek once more. Of course Superman had found him first. He could dodge journalists without issue, but none of his training had ever prepared him for evading a particularly perceptive alien. “Do you think you were there, the nights I saw you? Do you remember… anything that I said?”

Clark shrugged and eyed the cowl in Bruce’s hand. He didn’t seem uncomfortable, exactly, but Bruce could feel Clark’s gaze following the same line that his thumb drew. He had so much still to apologize for. And he had all the time in the world now to do it.

“I don’t really know. But… here’s the thing,” he said, and shifted slightly, angling himself toward Bruce. “For a long time, I thought the only memories we could have were of our past. But when I look at you, I remember… and I don’t even think _remember_ is the right word. It feels like there’s something else. It feels like I’m waiting for something. I can’t tell you what it is, but I know that it’s there.”

“Like a memory? Or…” Bruce paused and glanced up from the cowl. His gaze lingered on the crest, then found Clark’s face. There was no shadow on the ship for him to sink into. His eyes were warm. Blue, Bruce noted, with brown flecked through. He fought against comparing them in his mind to a photograph of the earth, and ultimately failed. “Like a dream. Easy to mistake for the truth.”

“Could be,” Clark said, then sighed and rubbed at his face. Every attempt he made at pushing his hair back caused it to simply fall back into place. Bruce fought against a smile. And ultimately failed. “Everything’s still so jumbled. It’s hard to make sense of it all. Even now, I get the feeling that I’m saying things that I’ve said already. I don’t know if I’m repeating myself or not. And maybe that’s what it is. Maybe I have more to say, and just haven’t said it yet.” He paused, noticing Bruce’s expression, and cocked his head. “What?”

“Nothing,” Bruce said. “I’m just… remembering something you told me.”

More precisely, he remembered the way Clark had smiled at him in the living room of Wayne Manor, and the words he’d said after. Bruce had not realized how unusual Clark’s speech had been, either in that dream or any that came before, but now the words stood out to him as the sort of dialogue that fit perfectly within a dream. He was still not truly certain whether any of his encounters with Clark _had_ been dreams, or reality, or possibly something in between. He was not certain that it mattered anymore. He had his truth, sitting next to him on a vaguely uncomfortable Kryptonian bench. Now it didn’t even seem to matter whether Clark was dead or alive. It simply mattered that he _was_.

“Hm,” Clark said. He furrowed his brow, glanced down at the cowl as if searching for answers, then shook his head, sheepish. “I have no idea. I feel like I’ve said so much. Was it important? Did it make sense, at least?”

Bruce remembered the crunch of debris beneath Clark’s boot, the long shapes cast by the moon shining through broken glass. He remembered the ghost he had met within Wayne Manor that now sat at his side, watching him expectantly.

Bruce took a breath, then set the cowl aside and turned to face Clark properly. It was time they had a proper conversation, face to face, without the barrier of masks, shadows, or death. One that could not be mistaken for anything but the truth. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe one day it will.”


End file.
